Date for your diary 14th September - Birmingham (UK) The Venue - The Holiday Inn, Birmingham Airport Convenient by road, rail and air   As with previous forums, participation is the key and there will be plenty of opportunity to network and exchange ideas and experiences.   PMA Retail Forum takes shape  Final preparations for the PMA Retail Buisness Development Forum are under way and it promises to be an action packed day with experts and peers sharing their knowledge and experience. And it’s going to be a very interactive day too.  The day starts with a two hour session “Introduction to the Mary Portas Masterclass”. You will have seen Mary’s programme on television, how she helps retailers understand what their business is all about and how to best present themselves. This  first session on the Masterclass is entitled “My Shop, My Future” and will ask you to examine the vision you have for your store. You will be asked to think as a retailer selling entirely different products and ask yourself how you would go about getting that message across. Then apply that same thinking to your own store, with the help of the Masterclass, using a mixture of experience and specialisation and a third vital ingredient which you will learn about on the day.  Following the Masterclass we have  a series of thought provoking short presentations from retailers and suppliers looking at new ideas and re-visiting old ones to bring them up to date.  The afternoon starts with a view of future trends presented by Anthony Norman of GfK. We all know of GfK’s retail audits and market data. Here Anthony will look at trends in consumer purchases across the consumer field, looking at where photo fits in and how it compares with other consumer products. Knowing the…

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Photomart announces launch of www.homeofdrylab.com  “This is a big milestone in the future of the photographic sector” says Lewis Martindale, Managing Director of Photomart. “As the number one distributor of Dry Labs in the UK, Photomart has taken steps forward to ensure the future of Photo Retailers and other Photo Lab operators with the launch of www.homeofdrylab.com.” Home of Dry Lab is the only site which offers customers a choice of all the quality names in DryLab including DNP, Exan, Fotolusio, Noritsu, Mitsubishi, Sony, Fujifilm and Kodak. There are also the latest Photo Gift ideas; such as digital-albums, photo-clocks, acrylic photo mounts and lots of other products to help contribute towards the success of the photo retail segment. In addition to the product pages there is also a large support section to help customers set up and maintain their equipment, data sheets and a Live Chat area for product related enquiries.

Mini Lab Help.com was set up several years back by Neil Taylor, it was set up when the net was in it’s infancy, and most people did not know or understand what the future would unfold. At the time of setting up the site, not many if any at all, labs even had a web site not to even mention a internet connection. But a different number of ideas came and went, and what you are seeing now is a web site, that has well over two and a half thousand members and thousands of hits every single day.  As time has gone on, the founder of minilabhelp.com has not stood still, he has always been forward thinking, even out spoken at times, but has always had the interest of the small individual lab owner/s at heart. Taylor, upon leaving school worked at a local professional laboratory, which at its time was maybe the number one lab in the country “Cheshire Colour Laboratories”  This was in, what some would say, the good old days with C41/EP2 chemistry, with E6 just a new idea (E4 the predecessor) Doing many roles in the lab he moved up the rank, and was given a opportunity around 1982 so be a manager at one of the very first mini labs in the UK.  He, then went on to be the manager and help set up the very first minilab for the now defunct Foto Processing in Manchester…. This was way back in 1984 back then 35mm processing was massive. In 1985 Neil was given a opportunity to go in to a partnership to start up a minilab, and in March 1987 a little known independent company called “BT Photographic” was born.  After 20 years at BT Photographic a opportunity came, to move on to other things, but BT Photographic…