Sutton Coldfield is a town of 105,000 plus people. It has a major shopping mall, the Gracechurch Centre, built alongside the busy Parade high street with shops of all shapes, sizes and types in close proximity.

So why do Suttonians make the two mile trip out to the fringes of the town to have their photos printed or a film processed, to buy a new camera, to order a photobook or a canvas or some other kind of photogift, get their passport photo taken and so on when they could just as easily do all of that when they're shopping in the town centre.

The answer, says Wendy Gray of Frost's Photo Centre in Mere Green, is easy. “Service,” she says. “We're not cheap but we offer a good service and people would rather pay a little but more and get that service.

“We offer a really good old fashioned traditional service in the store. If someone comes in and asks us to do something we don't normally do we don't turn them away - we can usually find a way of doing what they want.”

That service ethic has been key to its success over the years, helping attract customers from all over the town and from much further afield, and helping the store pick up plaudits such as a Service Excellence Award from Fujifilm, several 100 percent mystery shoppers ratings and two consecutive Independent Minilab of the Year awards at the Pixel Trade Awards.

Frost's has been around in Sutton Coldfield since the 1930s when John Frost, a keen photographer who was a founder member of the Sutton Coldfield Photographic Society opened a pharmacy in the town. Frost's went on to run six retail pharmacy stores, three of which included photographic departments, with one specialising in photography. It was the first store in Sutton Coldfield to offer on-site film processing and only the second in Birmingham.

In 2004, the company was sold to Boots but the photography store was bought out of the original company by the directors of John Frost Ltd and changed its name to Frosts Digital Imaging Centre. It's still family-run, now owned by John Frost's grandson Stuart.

But though the company's continued success is grounded in its long twentieth century heritage, it is nevertheless very much a bang up to date business. Indeed it was one of the first to offer digital printing in-store and it uses both twenty first century equipment and marketing techniques to keep it at the forefront of its market.

It has six Fujifilm SmartPix kiosks, five in the Mere Green shop and one at Frosts Pharmacy in Oxford, where customers are able to have their photos instantly printed in 6x4 format. Other orders received are sent electronically to Sutton Coldfield where they are printed on a Fujifilm DL450 Frontier digital minilab (for up to 12" and duplex printing) ready for mailing back to the customer.

The kiosks have been in place at Mere Green for around a year now, and in their first three months sales were well up with the speed of loading images so much better than it had been with the previous kiosks, so much so, in fact, that they have helped attract a regular, loyal customer base.

Photogifts and merchandise have become significant contributors to the overall imaging market - and that includes Frost's. Some items, like mugs, are outsourced but the store hosts a variety of equipment which means that the majority of orders are fulfilled in store. “We've lost count of the number of sheet of gift wrap we've printed,” admitted Wendy shortly before Christmas, who added that they produced “lots and lots canvases. In fact we do lots of everything!”

On the marketing front, Frost's has a dynamic website through which customers can buy pretty well everything that's available over the counter, including a whole range of products which they can order using the virtual kiosk on the website - and which, incidentally, is used regularly by customers in the US and Canada who order prints which can be collected by, for example, grandparents living locally to the store.

There's a monthly e-newsletter, too, which is sent to all of the customers on the store's database (and that means the majority of customers as only a handful leave the “please send me your newsletter” box unticked) and there are Facebook and Twitter links too.

As Wendy said, service is the key to their success but the company's highly proactive marketing strategy hangs crucially on the same key ring. For just as it's no good having the best product in the world if it's also the world's best kept secret, it's no good offering the best level of service in and around a store if no-one knows what that service is all about.

The SmartPix Kiosk is a highly flexible multi service kiosk that can provide instant prints, print to the in-store digital lab via PixManager or send orders via a managed online service to fulfilment labs around the world. Powered by a live updating architecture and a rich media interface, it has become the obvious choice for photo retailers within the UK.

Smartpix is a dynamic piece of software. The licence fee you pay not only allows you the use of one of the most powerful kiosk software packages available in photo retail but also means that you have immediate access to new products and services as soon as they become available. This means that new products can be introduced as required - the recent Christmas Wrapping paper templates are an example of this - but we also have planned, or 'road mapped' to use the jargon, changes every six months.

So in October 2011 some of the key additions were these:

The next road mapped changes are due to launch in Spring 2012 and these will include:

And we are already planning the Autumn July 2012 release in which we hope to offer:

For more information about this or any other Smartpix related products or services please contact softwaresupport@fuji.co.uk or call the Software Support help line on 01234 340040

SmartPix Refresher Workshop

As mentioned in D37 we will be running a Smartpix Refresher Workshop at Fujifilm's Head Office in Bedford. The date for this is confirmed as Wednesday, 25th January 2012.

You would have to make your own way to Bedford. The workshop will start at 12 midday with a light lunch and is likely to run for about four hours and cover some of the main issues we know that you have with using Smartpix such as price changing, product changing and using Remote 26. The course will be run by our Training Team Leader, Simon Rider. Our Software Support team will also be on hand to give one to one assistance on your own Smartpix software.

Numbers for the course are limited to 20. We still have a few spaces left so if you would like to attend please send your request to Peter Wigington at pwigington@fuji.co.uk by 9th January 2012

Welcome to our two latest members: