Consumer retail photo printing with Kodak Moments

Gary Pageau of the Dead Pixels Society talks with Scott Robinson, Director of Strategic Future Products at Kodak Moments. Robinson talks about the touch-free retail printing trends, consumer photo printing, retail changes in the age of COVID-19, and what channels are experiencing growth.

Kodak Moments is a leading global provider of photo products and services to retailers, consumers, and entertainment properties. We inspire consumers to bring their memories to life—delivering innovative, high-quality photo products and experiences they find truly meaningful. Powered by over 100,000 consumer touchpoints across 30 countries globally, it’s our mission to be the brand consumers choose to celebrate and preserve life’s memories, from the big events to the everyday moments that matter.

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Transcript

Gary Pageau  0:02  
Hello again, and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau. And today we're joined by Scott Robinson, the director of strategic future products at Kodak Moments and we're going to be talking about photo kiosks. Hi, Scott, how are you today?

Scott Robinson  0:19  
I'm great, Gary, and thanks a lot for your interest in Kodak moments and for having a conversation with me today.

Gary Pageau  0:26  
No problem. So first for our audience. Can you talk a little bit about where Kodak moments fits into the array of Kodak businesses, I guess is the way to phrase that.

Scott Robinson  0:39  
And I think there is some confusion sometimes about that, Gary. So, you know, Kodak Alaris was really born out of some Eastman Kodak company businesses back in 2013, as a part of their exit from chapter 11. And so Kodak alaris lives on as a separate company, privately held out of the UK, and Kodak alaris is made up of a couple of different business units. Predominantly, it's Kodak, its alaris business, which is very much a b2b business with scanners and software and services for businesses. And then there's Kodak moments, which is much more of a digital photo, you know, consumer photo business, which you know, we work with b2b customers, as well as directly to the consumer.

Gary Pageau  1:32  
So you have an array of products and services in the Kodak moments portfolio, including apps, and also kiosks and I want to talk to you right now about the new Kodak moments to go. kiosks. Can you tell us a little bit about the new touchless innovation in that kiosk?

Scott Robinson  1:54  
Sure, Gary, let me start by telling you a little bit about Kodak moments to go. We started off on this as a kind of a product where we felt a need in the marketplace. First of all, because there were traditional, I guess, retailer outlets that had had photo and had photo labs, many labs etc. have been the traditional outlets for photo. But there's a need in the industry to bring experiences to other retailers. And there's a lot of retailers out there that offer very convenient locations for consumers. But they don't want the complexity of managing a photo department. So ultimately, we started to look at, you know, could we create a small footprint, easy to use, easy to maintain product which we could drop into retail locations, and would allow them to offer up a photo service to their consumers that visit their location. That kind of started off and morphed into really a completely self service station, which is basically owned, operated all by Kodak moments. So it's hands off by the retailer, they can just have to provide a power source in a small footprint. And we drop that in there. And now their customers have access to photos whenever they visit. And those photos can be ordered from out of store as well as directly in store using either their phone or the touchscreen that's on the device.

Gary Pageau  3:29  
Does the review have to provide Internet too? Or is that something that you've built into the machine,

Scott Robinson  3:35  
we've built that into the machine, it turns out that were you when you get into this class of retail called automated retail, they kind of have an expectation that you don't have to go off of their internet or the you know, their backbone, their corporate backbone so we can build cellular services in today with good bandwidth and make our connection via cell.

Gary Pageau  3:58  
That's kind of interesting, because I know one of the concerns that retailers have who offer wireless in their locations is security. So you're bypassing that completely.

Scott Robinson  4:13  
Yeah, that is absolutely a great point, Gary, because, you know, one of the difficult conversations, when we first started this way was, you know, if you want to ask them for internet, you have a lengthy discussion with an IT department which can really stall out the idea of bringing this to market. So by offering this with a cellular service, a cellular connection, assuming they have a location, obviously that has adequate bandwidth to provide such a, you know, a good customer experience. It's such a location, then we can manage that all by ourselves.

Gary Pageau  4:47  
So right now you're offering this as like a managed service and you're doing you've got locations. According to your announcements in Arizona, Kentucky in New York. How have they been working in the marketplace?

Scott Robinson  5:00  
A lot of them are very new. So they're very, very much, you know, get it driving awareness and trial of those, but they're absolutely working great. Gary, we measure? Well, first of all, we take customer satisfaction, very important. And we always listen to feedback and try to react to that. And we measure our devices by a net promoter score, if you're familiar with that. And in our net promoter scores are very good. So I feel like we really have a service that consumers love, once they try it. Obviously, we're putting this into locations that aren't traditional locations. So we have to first of all, we drive some awareness of the product, and then, you know, get them to trial it but again, we have excellent results when they do trial it good feedback from the consumers that do.

Gary Pageau  5:50  
So what are some of the services offered through the kiosk Are you offering, you know, onsite printing, access to a portal for pickup and gifting later, are the gifts delivered to the store to the home.

Scott Robinson  6:02  
So we've, we've actually experimented with a few different things here. But right now, our primary offering is in store, we can deliver kind of standard print sizes, so obviously, four by six, five by seven, six by eight, five by five, six by six kind of, you know, different print formats. For other products that consumers might be interested in, we linked them actually to our direct to consumer ship to home business, so we can take them to an internet site, basically, which is just, you know, our Kodak moments calm, a mirror of our Kodak moments.com site, where they can order other products that they might be interested in, as we know, it's a growing segment in the industry. And they can get those then shipped directly to their home.

Gary Pageau  6:50  
And is that the retailer participates in that revenue share correct? Even if it's ordered online and shipped on Amazon's displays through the kiosk.

Scott Robinson  7:00  
Yeah, if it's ordered through the kiosk or ordered from the store, even via their mobile phone, because we offer again, you know, we're going to get to this touch free service that we offer through your mobile device. We can track all that. And we can give credit back to the retailer for that.

Gary Pageau  7:17  
So let's talk about contactless, obviously, in the age of COVID. people interacting with services in a retail environment surfaces, I should say in a retail environment is a concern. How has the new Kodak moments kiosk address that? How does it actually work?

Scott Robinson  7:38  
Sure, let me explain that a little bit, you know, and it starts off with by the way that we stirs we kind of first recognize this in the first wave of COVID, as it hit the United States. And most of us went into a shelter in place type of, you know, lockdown. And we started to think to ourselves, you know, it's, there are a number of, you know, concerns that consumers have now going into stores. So we pivoted an agile team toward what could we do to take some of the things that we have and bring to bear a completely contact lis consumer journey. And it turned out that, you know, in the development, actually of our Kodak moments to go cell service sprint station that we just talked about, we had developed the ability to do well, we kind of took a mobile first approach, I guess, is what I would say. And it wasn't mobile only, but it was mobile first. And that, you know, a lot of transaction could happen on the mobile phone, but not all of it. So what we did was look at the parts of the customer journey that didn't include the ability to kind of not touch anything. And we said, okay, how can we change that? And, you know, we're very much you know, I guess believers in you know, design thinking principles. So we kind of empathize and we ideated around that and we trialed some things. And we do a lot of consumer testing. You know, both online and in our lab that we have in our development, you know, facility in Rochester, New York. And we trialed it several different things. But ultimately, we've been able to provide a journey where the consumer can scan a QR code with their phone or put in a URL in their browser on their phone. They can select the products that they want to build, they can build those out, create, you know their order, then they can release that order where they can pay for it all on their phone and then release that. You know buy oil from their phone without having to touch the unit. The only thing they end up doing at the end is obviously they grab their prints out of the print bin. But those are prints that have come out fresh, they're not been touched by anyone else and they pick those up and can go so we believe that you know the Kodak moments to go solution has You know very much solve the problem of you don't have to touch a surface.

Gary Pageau  10:10  
Is this a technology that you're going to be able to retrofit to existing kiosks?

Scott Robinson  10:15  
Yes, Gary, we can do that. We've developed it in a way that we can also offer this to our retail partners that have our traditional kiosks. And, you know, obviously, each of our retailers has their own operation. And obviously, we take that into account, when we design anything, we know that there's a lot of unique specifics to each retailer, and how they want to configure things and how their in store operations work. But we've built a system with this, that is, we can adapt to different configurations and different styles of how they release product, once you know you to a consumer in the store. The one thing we don't solve in that, in that case is the the payment piece. We basically similarly you can scan from your phone, a QR code, or input a URL, you can connect to the service all on your phone, it's essentially serving up a mobile webpage, and all of the creation takes place there and the release of the order takes place there, you then have to get the clerk to, you know, either give you your prints, or you collect them yourself, depending on the configuration of the store. And then, but almost all stores offer contact lists payment now. So essentially, again, the consumer journey is pretty much context free.

Gary Pageau  11:35  
So can you give us some examples of the type of retailers who are looking at adding the Kodak moments to go type format? Yes, the reason why I asked that is because we've seen in recent announcements, you know, some retailers even exiting the physical photo category, right? They're pulling out their equipment, and they're going online only. And it seems to me like it's a you know, it's a business decision, right? If if they're putting in a big if they have a big mini lab with some with some big floorspace jobs, not generating the money, you know, to come out. So clearly a kiosk or something smaller, may make more sense on a on a per square foot basis. But it seems to me like it's a very much an individual retailer type decision, some retailers still have very large motor departments, comparatively others have downsized significantly. But you said this was to look at new channels, correct?

Scott Robinson  12:32  
Yeah, new channels, or you could even argue old channels, I think we all probably remember, you know, certainly, grocery stores, I used to have at one time many labs, and they all took them out. Because they're a a required labor, large floor space, there were at the time, there were chemicals to deal with, etc, before the dry labs came about. And, you know, I think what they don't want to do is get back into that business, no one's looking to get back into a very high labor costs type of business. And that's one of the things obviously that the Kodak moments to go solution solves is there actually zero labor, you know, you really don't have to have any involvement we replenish it, we we do all the marketing, we do all the maintenance. And so there really isn't a labor content. And it's a very small square footage. So there's not a large, you know, place that it takes up, it typically goes in the front of the stores. With other automated retails such as red boxes and coin stars, where there really isn't selling, they don't really consider that necessarily selling space anyway within the store. So that's kind of one of the places that it kind of fits well with. And again, those are the same kind of classes is you know, what, how can you offer a value added service to your, your consumer base, but you don't have to add a lot of labor or floor space or complexity and operations,

Gary Pageau  14:02  
right. I'm one of those folks who believes that the more printing photo printing is seen in the marketplace, whether you know, in a mass channel, especially channel anywhere is it's better for everybody, right? Because the visibility helps it's it's like industry wide PLP, if you will. So I think there's a great idea just in the standpoint of reminds people that wow, you know, I better print this these darn pictures on my phone. Right?

Scott Robinson  14:31  
Exactly. I think we all remember the day when Well, at least many of us remember the day. I won't say all because certainly there's a class of of, you know, of consumers coming up that don't recall film at all. But certainly we remember the day at the grocery Checkout, at least I do when it was stocked with film, right and, you know, photo was in front of you everywhere, and it certainly isn't today. So this is one thing that it does do is it gets photo back and in front of a lot of foot traffic.

Gary Pageau  15:07  
So, tell me a little bit about what you're seeing in the photo kiosk market overall, it's one of those things where you talk to industry people, and it's like, oh, kiosks are dead. They're, you know, no one's putting in kiosks and you talk to some of the vendors, they're like, No, I'm actually, you know, kiosks are actually doing pretty well in in the retailers who are supporting them and providing service for them.

Scott Robinson  15:34  
I think first of all, they'll have a roll for a very, very long time. I do think that there is some change in consumer behavior here. Certainly, even the pandemic has a call hastened some of that change. In that more people are ordering online for pickup in store. But again, if you start to think about self service, even in that scenario, you know, I think you could look at a number of mass retailers where they'll have online pickup in store, but you go to a kiosk, once you get to the store to kind of claim your order. Right. So I think, you know, in general, kiosks have a roll for a very long time. Also, we have found even though we've offered mobile first and click and collect, that there's certainly a lot of consumers who very much want that experience at a kiosk still. Yeah. You know, I can tell you that, well, we offer a mobile first experience on our Kodak moments to go, we still have a half to two thirds of people that would still prefer to use the touchscreen. So that's, that's still going to be a preference, I think for quite a long time. There's certain behaviors, it just don't change quickly. And so I view it as a place where well, the role of it might change over time, I think it has a very long future.

Gary Pageau  16:57  
Yeah, definitely, I think the a lot of people tend to look at photo or even just consumer electronics and other categories, as you know, zero sum game, right? Well, people can look at the pictures on their phone, so they don't need to print anymore. Well, that's not the case, people like physical prints, they may print differently, may print on different surfaces, and they may do different things. But for the most part, it's it's not a zero sum game. And like you said, we have to create as an industry a way to increase access to photo because some of the access points have gone away.

Scott Robinson  17:39  
I agree with you, Gary, there, I think that's one of the things we you know, as an industry, we have to be concerned about is to make sure it stays presence in the present in the minds of consumers. And I'm not just talking about, you know, the people that we've you know, we I guess a lot of times we think about, you know, well, you know, of course, there's a generation that printed, I can assure you that, you know, I'll use a personal example here, I have a 17 year old daughter who absolutely loves to have prints and I know others that are just like her, as well. And she, you know, she decorates her room with them. And she changes them out frequently. And so we have a number of cases like that this, this is not a you know, this, there's a future here in printing the product that the exact physical format that they like, as you say, may change and the way they use the photos may change some. But I think people still very much resonate with the physical printed product. It's, it's, it's a different experience than what you get off of a screen.

Gary Pageau  18:41  
Now, you mentioned the pandemic earlier, that's really changed consumer behavior. I think, as we go forward some of the behavior that consumers have adopted in because of COVID, like, you know, maybe reducing the amount of store visits, being wary of touching services are going to continue even after the pandemic is eradicated, hopefully, sometime in the year 2021. Is this something that you're anticipating continuing as well?

Scott Robinson  19:15  
I do, Gary, I think that, you know, we're gonna see a change in behavior, which is permanent here. I mean, I've read several McKinsey reports. By I'm kind of a fan of theirs and some of the research that they do. And, you know, some of these behaviors have really leapfrogged, you know, you know, what they would say is, you know, ecommerce, for example, probably gained eight years of adoption in a matter of a couple of months. And unfortunately,

Gary Pageau  19:43  
the postal service in didn't leave any amount of efficiency, right?

Scott Robinson  19:49  
Yes, unfortunately, I know, I know, people that might still be waiting for Christmas gifts. But yes, I think that you're gonna see some permanent change here. There's going to Be more, I believe there'll be more buy online pick up at the store for photo products, we certainly see a, you know, a surge in that. And I think that's going to continue, I think, but retail is still a very popular destination for getting that product, you know, basically within the hour. Right. Um, you know, and I think it would be interesting if some of the retailers included that in there, you know, one hour delivery to home as a service, which I think you know, is possible that they'll start to consider that.

Gary Pageau  20:33  
Yeah, that's interesting. I was just thinking, you've got your shift and others other home delivery services, but I don't know, it's funny people. I remember back in the day, when there was, you know, film processing, some people experimented with that. You know, for me, if somebody was spending $18, to process a roll of film, that it wasn't outside the realm of possibility, they would drop it off at your house, because within a certain geographical range of the whole of the lab. So what goes around comes around, right, there's really nothing new.

Scott Robinson  21:07  
Yeah, it's a it's amazing how the, you know, history repeats itself, as you say.

Gary Pageau  21:12  
So, you mentioned Kodak Moments has a shipped to home service. Can you talk a little bit about the Kodak Moments portfolio, if you will. So because I don't think everyone knows everything that Kodak Moments is specifically responsible for?

Scott Robinson  21:32  
Oh, I'd be happy to kind of elaborate on that, Gary, first of all, you know, I think if you looked at kind of what our core business has been, since its inception, has been the idea of providing a kiosk for retailers at retail locations. And we still, you know, we offer a number of different, you know, products there and services for retailers. And that is a big part of the business. At Kodak moments, we have the apex dry labs, which you know, are a little higher volume, and they're kind of I'll call it behind the counter services that a lot of these buy online, pick up in stores, or click and collect orders flow through to the network orders. And, you know, certainly we offer that service as well that we connect our retailers and websites to those units. That's a service we provide. And so things like for example, you know, Google prints, Google print sends to one of our retail partners, and we manage all those orders down to that retail partner so that those can be fulfilled. So those Apex labs are very important. But obviously, there's the consumer facing kiosk as well, we have a higher end model in the G 20. And we also have a kind of a more entry level product called the M one. Those are products that you know, basically have the consumer facing software for creating all kinds of different products. And we we basically work to introduce several new products every year, that consumers can do a retailing, you know, including some pretty elaborate things that you might have used to only been able to get at, you know, by ordering them to home with several weeks to delivery.

Gary Pageau  23:20  
Are those other kiosks available in the the service model? Or are they more of a traditional kiosk?

Scott Robinson  23:26  
No, they're more of a traditional, I think if you're talking about a service model, let me clarify in being that we we, you know, own and operate them. Yes, yeah. No, this is more of a traditional business model where, you know, they basically have the asset, they own the asset, generally speaking, and, and, you know, we provide service avail is available to them, for example, but they really own it and operate it, we provide software updates to it, but it's really their operation. So it's their labor, it's their, their staffing floorspace, obviously that provides the service.

Gary Pageau  24:04  
So really, the the the new Kodak moments ago is really the only offering you have that has the the service model.

Scott Robinson  24:12  
Yeah, the full service model where you don't touch anything, you don't have any inventory, you don't have any, you know, you don't have any capital expense. The really the only thing you were providing us is a power source in a space.

It is and I'm gonna say that I don't even have a good guess for you. It's been installed for like, as you say, it's actually more than 10 years now. And we continue to, I guess replenish those at some places that bought the early ones. They, you know, they're getting new shoe ones, etc. So I don't have a good number for you that I can easily give you today.

Gary Pageau  25:07  
So, going forward, looking into 2021, how do you see the photo market, the photo printing market evolving? And possibly growing? because like you said, we've been hearing reports of people having pretty impressive gains from an e commerce standpoint for this year.

Scott Robinson  25:31  
Yeah, well, certainly, you know, our, as we mentioned, our Kodak moments dot coms service, our ship to home service saw increase this year in e commerce, just due to the fact that more people were looking for that kind of service as they avoided retail, during the pandemic. In but in general, I do you see, well, I do see that there's certainly some people that are, you know, doing ship to home. Equally, there's a good number of people that are using that kind of call it network ordering to order at store, because they still want that kind of same day delivery, you know, and obviously, we've gotten a number of very big names in the supply industry, that are out there, you know, increasingly teaching you that you should everything should come to you same day or within a couple of days. So I think that the kind of expectation that this is somewhat instantaneous delivery, still puts a big demand on retail as a big part of the photo experience. The products that can be produced at retail, are very important to the industry. And we know that we keep increasing the number of things and the number of products that can be made right in a retail shop, assuming that that retailers are willing to put in a little bit of labor. Right. So, you know, everything from canvases to mugs, to photo panels all can be now produced in the store. And you can get them within the hour.

Gary Pageau  27:03  
Right? Yeah, it is pretty amazing. But like you said, that requires some investment in personnel and training from the retailer standpoint. So that's always a kind of a tug of war, if you will. And that's in that area. because like you said, some people want to go to the unattended model, just drop in the box Kodak moments to go, or they want a full blown photo department.

Scott Robinson  27:29  
It really depends on the strategy of that retailer, and how important that photo service I think is to their consumer base. So that's probably one of their decision points. We you know, and again, we we have services to kind of work with all of those models, you know, Kodak moments to go is, like I said is the way we solve I'll call it the Endless Aisle of photo products with that particular device is that we we direct you to a ship to home model, because they're not going to have the space and the staff to produce an elaborate photo product in those stores. But we other retail partners that we work with photos very strategic to them. And they have, you know, they're okay with a labor model. And as long as you make it easy enough for their labor model, right, so operations is very key. And a big important part of what we do is really consider how will this work within a store operation with a staff that's not going to be necessarily even dedicated to photo. So it has to be pretty simple. So we spent a lot of time on the, in that case, the customer experience is very much the clerk. What's their experience? And how do we make this easy for them to do?

Gary Pageau  28:42  
Right? Because their attitude can often make a department grow or sink depending on their experience, they provide the customer, right? So they look at photo as a chore or an obstruction, something else that they need to do it can be a problem. So you've got to make it easy and seamless for not only the consumer, but for the in store staff.

Scott Robinson  29:04  
Yeah, and also Gary, I would say that when we design something and we can get the staff excited about it, hey, it's this is a cool product. And it's not hard to make, they also become advocates for which is a really key part of the whole business.

Gary Pageau  29:16  
Yeah, exactly. Well, thank you Scott, for your time. I appreciate it. And looking forward to more excitement coming from Kodak moments this year.

Scott Robinson  29:25  
Great. Thanks a lot for your time, Gary, appreciate your interest in what we're doing at Kodak moments and, and hopefully we'll all have a better 2021 here and we'll hopefully see the end of the pandemic and consumers get to relax a little bit more and all of us get to have a little bit of our lives back.