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Brisbane's Courier Mail recently featured Phil Gresham's move from Queen Street Mall to street front premises.
Story by Sophie Foster
Picture by Annette Dew
HIS business has been part of the Myer Centre in Queen Street Mall for more than two decades, but with rent reaching crippling levels and more space crucial to growth, Phil Gresham has decided to quit the area.
The owner of Fotofast is taking his family operation a 60-second walk away to Adelaide Street in the Brisbane CBD, where he will have a bigger site at a much more manageable rental level.
"The rent at the moment is outrageous at around $37,000 a month to be here," Mr Gresham said. "I've got 100sq m, which includes the storage area I rented. I've been here 21 years. Late last year, they said another 5 per cent.
"If we weren't moving, they would negotiate, but the problem is we are growing. We need space and we need to open outside the hours of the centre."
Fotofast will be moving to an Adelaide Street site owned by Queensland company Wallace Bishop, which is one of the few that has managed to maintain prime mall frontage in the Brisbane CBD.
"We're gaining 70 per cent more room and will be paying about 20 per cent less, which is a good, fair deal for us," Mr Gresham said.
He started Fotofast after selling out 33 film developing stores in Queensland to Kodak in mid-1990.
To stay in business, and because of his passion for the industry, Mr Gresham said they always kept ahead of trends.
Fotofast introduced whole roll film scanning to disk in 1997, sending and storing images on the internet in 1999, Fotofast Display in 2001 for posters, backlit transparencies and banners in all shapes and sizes.
That same year, they began offering digital photo ordering in-store using kiosks, and in 2007 moved to one-hour bound photo books and other creative products. Last year, customer operated Creation Stations were in place.
"We've got a lot of extensions to our business, because we couldn't survive just on film," Mr Gresham, 61, said. "It's such a diversified industry and we're filling a need. I'm prepared to change and to handle change."
June will see the company's Adelaide Street concept store open, with new photo kiosks, studios and, most importantly for Mr Gresham, space to run classes after business hours.
"Our business model is we do it with you," he said. "You can do a lot of stuff in our store without us. But a lot of people also want help and to talk to people who won't treat them like idiots. I get a lot of enjoyment out of seeing people be able to create something uniquely their own."
Mr Gresham said it was that personal touch that drove their success. "That's what we've got and we can offer it all day, every day. If you deal with the biggies, they don't care."
Running off a large database of customers, with much of their advertising done online and through social media, Fotofast is ready for the next stage of its development.
"I'm very enthusiastic about it and I've got a good team working with me," Mr Gresham said. "I would be bored if I did anything else."
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