Business developing nicely at Lakeside

WHEN LAKESIDE CAMERA & Imaging opened its doors 28 years ago, "pocket" cameras were hardly compact, express processing meant two days and Super 8 film projectors provided the closest thing to "home videos "

A lot has changed, in both technology and the camera store business.

As drugstores

Rather than settling into a smaller, specialized niche, as some independent camera stores have done, Lakeside took the opposite approach. They expanded and added services.

"We're not real concerned about our survival because we're so diversified," says Lakeside President David Guidry; son of founders Susan and the late Rodney Guidry.

As products go, that means a customer at Lakeside can choose from bags and tripods, purchase top-tier digital cameras by Nikon and professional grade Hasselblad manual cameras or buy a simple point-and-shoot 35mm camera. And where services are concerned, it means customers see new digital and traditional film processing options alongside specialty tasks ranging from photo restoration to what the store calls "speaker supports," or help with a presenters visual aids.

Guidry claims Lakeside controls the biggest market share locally because the store is consistently among the first in town to offer new products and services.

In 1981, shortly after moving the business from a cramped storefront on Severn Avenue to the store's present home at 3508 21st Street, the Guidrys installed a one-hour film-processing lab; it was the second one in the city, with the first being set up by the now-closed Westside Camera.

Way back in 1989 the Guidrys began providing a digital imaging service - a new way to make slides from computer software. No one else in town was offering the service.

"I'm the little guy who call move fast," says Guidry.

Four years ago, the Guidry family opened a second store in Mandeville, where the founding couple lived at the time.

In recent years, the younger Guidry has concentrated mainly on beefing up the Metairie flagship store. In March, he added a custom framing area. Last year, he also acquired a 1,500-square-foot lot adjacent to the building and expanded the store to 6,500 square feet.

Before that came high-tech improvements - a $180,000 digital mini-processing lab, which call receive and print digital images onto photo paper and compact discs, and a high-resolution inkjet printer that makes posters out of color prints. Guidry has also purchased equipment that enables his staff to bum digital images onto traditional film arid convert aging reel-to-reel home movies to videocassettes.

The service-bundling strategy has paid off - the company's stores earned a combined $5 million in revenue last year, a company record, Guidry says. But the changes have been costly.

Most notably, the staff has grown from fewer than 10 workers in Lakeside's early years to 50 employees. Guidry says labor costs are now his biggest single expense, accounting for around 20% of his operating budget.

Equipment upgrades also add up. Though he has always financed traditional film processing machines on a five-year schedule, Guidry says Lakeside is financing some new digital image processing equipment on a three-year schedule. That means higher payments in the short rim. But the advanced schedule gives the store the ability to sell equipment before it becomes obsolete - a danger with rapidly changing digital technology.

While Guidry says the sale of digital cameras - which he claims Lakeside offered first in the city in 1996 - and digital image processing are the fastest-growing sections of his business now, lie sees image storage arid display as the next potential boon.

He has arranged his stores accordingly, giving over the bulk of the floor space to shelves filled with photo albums, picture frames and portfolios.

"The number of images being shot is growing exponentially," he says, pointing to the drop in price of film arid film processing and the explosion in demand for digital cameras as factors. "They have to put all those pictures somewhere."

Amateur photographers are expected to shoot 2.9 million pictures next year, further fueling an industry that Fortune magazine has estimated at $14.2 billion in revenue.

Guidry estimates that over half of his business comes from amateurs, with only a small percentage of "legitimate professionals" contributing.

"It's nice to know they're there," says David Rae Mortis, a local freelance photographer who shoots for national news services arid magazines. He compliments the store's service and selection and adrmits to using them "in a pinch" when on assignment dose by, though lie normally develops images at specialized professional labs closer to his Bywater address.

"(Lakeside) certainly caters to people who know what they're doing," Morris says. Still, he says he generally buys his supplies, including discounted film and photographic paper, from out-of-state suppliers via the Internet.

All-purpose camera stores find it most difficult to compete with catalog and Internet wholesalers that can pitch goods at near-wholesale prices - an advantage of operating a warehouse rather than a retail store with high overhead costs, says Guidry.

But where such stores can grow is in the areas of photo processing and storage arid display, says Wayne Freedman, vice president of marketing for Wolf Camera Inc. in Alpharetta, Ga., the nation's second-largest camera store chain with four sites in New Orleans.

Like Guidry, Freedman believes that despite the hype surrounding the Internet and its potential for selling cheaper products and taking over image processing (more than a dozen Web sites now offer this service), most people will continue to make those purchases at a stores in their neighborhoods with people who can help them.

Still, Wolf slowed its national expansion after an acquisition spree in 1998 and has closed about 200 underperforming stores, including two in New Orleans. Freedman says the cooling is less a result of competitive pressures from the Internet than it is about standing amidst a market saturated by quickservice film development houses and all uncertain national economic climate.

"I'd be a fool to drink people who live in Uptown are going to drive to Metairie to drop every roll here" when they have a drugstore nearby, - says Guidry. "But we're the place that people bring the roll that matters."

Though Lakeside may use the same machine many drugstores use to process film, the difference comes in the "experience and education" of a staff that understands how to get the best prints out of those machines and when to toss the photos that aren't "acceptable," says store manager J.C. Dufresne. "We're picky as hell," he says.

Oscar Rajo is a local wedding photographer who has been a loyal customer of Lakeside Camera for 16 years. Recently, Rajo has been hunting a digital camera and stopped into Lakeside for informal tutorials on product lines. Though he says he likes the idea of buying locally, he patronizes Lakeside for another reason. "It may sound major, but it's important to me: Everyone there is nice."