Photo supplier survives in a digital world
Independent camera stores, at one time the company’s main customers, were disappearing in the face of competition form Kmart, Walmart, Best Buy and Amazon.com. With the arrival of digital photography in the early 2000s, film sales plunged.
"Digital photography, faster than anyone could have predicted, took out the film business, Sweetwood said. "Unfortunately, that’s our business, so we needed to reinvent our business."
An early strategy was to target professional photographers as key customers and treat them as if they were business-to-business customers rather than retail customers.
In 2007, the company had an opportunity to move from Florham Park to a prime highway location on Route 46 in Fairfield, and Sweetwood used the move to create what he believed would be the type of camera store and distribution center that would make Unique a destination for photo enthusiasts as well as professional photographers.
His vision appears to have paid off. The 60,000-square-foot Unique building houses a retail store, a warehouse and distribution center, a rental center for high-end lenses and cameras and several classrooms for Unique University, which offers courses ranging from basic photography to digital software like PhotoShop, as well as one-on-one instruction. The company, in all its operations, does in excess of $50 million in sales annually, Sweetwood said, and sales per square foot in the retail store are more than $1,000.
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