When Traditional Meets Millennial

From camera shop to funeral service, entrepreneurs of the next generation are inheriting their families’ traditional businesses and reimagining them for the 21st century.

- Karen Tee

If video killed the radio star, then smartphone cameras might have killed the photography buff. Or maybe not, if 28-year-old Alvan Tan has his way about it.

Over the past decade, with smartphones rendering obsolete the practice of carrying a compact digital camera, Alan Photo Trading, the camera shop Tan’s father founded in 1986, experienced a dramatic downturn.

“Most of our customers were compact digital camera users and as they shifted to smartphone cameras, we began to face difficulty in sales,” says Tan, who joined the company as a retail salesman in 2010 and worked his way up the ranks to manager. “We knew we had to do something.”

The younger Tan realised he had to pivot from the “sunset industry” and, so, introduced videography equipment and a wide range of photography accessories, while focusing on providing customers with a different retail experience. These efforts culminated in the launch of REC by Alan Photo – a new concept store – in Lavender Street last year, which Tan says is “massively different” from traditional camera retail stores. Stocked with an encyclopaedic range of products, equipment and software to meet the pre- to post-production needs of shutterbugs, it also has two photo studios, a makeup corner, a photo printing station and even a cafe.

“I realised many customers may have a camera but don’t exactly know how to fully utilise it, so we decided to run workshops and events for customers to learn new skills. The main idea is to instil the mindset that the smartphone camera is incomparable with a camera and also spark the interest of photography in as many people as possible,” he adds. The business has recorded a 20 per cent increase in turnover since he joined.

FRESH IDEAS GALORE