Eastmon History
Eastmon was started in 1961 by Howard Eastwood as a hobby doing black and white processing in a specially built shed at the rear of his relatives home in Pitt Street, Glen Innes. Howard soon expanded his market network to surrounding districts. This continued until the explosion of colour photography.
Howard built his first colour processing machine in 1973 in his backyard and was soon wholesale processing to large sections of Northern NSW. After seeing his brother’s efforts in building his processing machine, Howard's brother Richard could see room for improvement and together they built the world's first 3-hour processing machine that opened in Tamworth in 1977.
A strong relationship with Kodak had been established and Kodak encouraged Eastmon to continue with the same day processing concept. Stores opened continuously up until the late 80's as the entire Australian market became saturated. Eastmon went into hardware in 1985 joining the Camera House marketing group.
In 1991 Eastmon trialled the concept of a store-within-a-store in pharmacies which was quickly superseded by technology. During this period Eastmon became the biggest privately owned photographic group in Australia and was the winner of the first Kodak Quality award. Eastmon has also developed a strong relationship of respect and trust with suppliers and is well regarded in the photographic industry.
In 1995 Howard’s eldest son, Hugh became involved in the business and at the same time the company adopted the principals of systemisation as explained by Michael Gerber in his book, The E-Myth. This resulted in the stores all operating a centrally controlled business model with tight operating process and procedures in the store. Howard retired in 1999 and Hugh and his brother Dan, took over the running of the Eastmon family business and became majority shareholders.
In 2000 the stores were all performing well and the Eastmon group began an expansion phase toward a goal of 100 stores. Three stores were opened which were failures, with great lessons learnt from the experience. Hugh then decided that the direction for the company was not to have a lot of stores but to become a world class business with what Eastmon had already.
Digital cameras then began to impact the way people printed their pictures and in 2002 Eastmon saw that Fujifilm had a retail print solution and Kodak did not. Eastmon changed to using Fujifilm Frontiers and saw small growth in the digital print market. In early 2003 Eastmon achieved another world first when they pioneered and invented the use of multi kiosk at retail as a self serve printing solution for consumers at retail. Initially starting with four in a row in it’s Tamworth store, the trial was so successful that within two months multiple kiosk was introduced to the others stores and by 2004, every store had 8 kiosks. It would be three to four years before the rest of the world would adopt this concept as a standard.
In 2004 Fujifilm and Kodak could see the success of the Eastmon Business Model when the Eastmon results and performance were presented to the industry at the annual Photo Marketing Association industry business conference. Shortly thereafter and within the same week, both Fujifilm and Kodak approached Eastmon to manage their respective Rabbit Photo and Klick photographic retail chains.
Eastmon agreed to manage the Rabbit chain of stores because it would be a replication of the Eastmon business model and had established a strong working relationship with Fujifilm management. Unfortunately for Kodak a profitable solution still did not exist for the retailer. Rabbit Photo is now the largest company owned specialty photo chain in Australia.
In 2004 Eastmon started an Information Technology company called Smart Networks. This company developed all the networking capability that allowed the centralised retail model to scale up and expand and to maintain all the kiosk platforms and online support.
With this network platform established between all kiosks, digital labs and all computers in the store, Eastmon was able to look at the possibility of putting photo gifting and photo books on the kiosk and feeding back to a centralised wholesale lab.
In 2006 Eastmon started a new company called Photo Create under the astute direction of Industry icon Rob Tolmie. Photo Create focuses on personalised photo products and has quickly developed into the largest digital wholesale lab in the southern hemisphere. Photo Create has broadened it’s product range to include digital prints, enlargements, photo books, photo gifts, canvas, and materials. Photo Create does work for the industry powerhouses in Snapfish, Big W, Harvey Norman, Apple, Dick Smith, Rabbit Photo, Camera House, Bing Lee, Kodak Express, Creative Memories and many others.
In 2006 after the success of the Eastmon and Fujifilm relationship with Rabbit Photo Eastmon was asked by Fujifilm to manage the 20 store Camera House group in New Zealand. In 2006 Eastmon were also asked to manage the Fuji owned wholesale lab in New Zealand called Viko, and implement the successful digital wholesale model being developed in Photo Create. In 2007 Fujifilm sold the wholesale Viko to a joint venture between Photo Create and the only competitor in the New Zealand market Kroma.
Eastmon holds a significant place in the Photographic markets in Australia and New Zealand and is continuing to look for opportunities to expand it’s retail and wholesale capabilities.
