Concord Camera

» see concord-camera.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

There is a reasonable chance I used something this company made and had no way of knowing it. That was the entire business model. Concord Camera built cheap cameras in China and put other companies' names on them, so the thing you picked off a rack by a till in 1997 and handed back over a counter to be developed had a brand on it that belonged to somebody else. Concord's own name was on a minority of its output. You cannot be nostalgic for a company you never knew you were a customer of, which is a strange kind of distance to have from a product.

It was founded in 1982 in Rahway, New Jersey by Jack C. Benun, who told the Wall Street Journal he had started out as a teenager reselling pawn shop cameras out of a car on the streets of Manhattan. He opened a factory in Bao'an, in southern China, in 1983, which was early for an American consumer goods company and turned out to be the whole advantage. Concord could make a working 35mm camera for less money than anyone selling under their own name wanted to charge for one.

So it made them for everyone. Concord product went out under Polaroid, Argus, Keystone, Le Clic, Goldline and Apex badges, and under its own name at the cheap end. It had real success with single-use cameras, the cardboard-wrapped kind you bought already loaded and returned intact. By 1998 the headquarters had moved to Hollywood, Florida, and the stock traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker LENS, which is the only genuinely elegant thing about this company.

~ the case file ~

~ the brands it hid behind ~

The retailer list is the real measure of how big this got. Concord sold into Walmart, Target, Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid, Dollar General, Family Dollar, Eckerd, Ritz Camera and CompUSA in the United States, and into Boots, Argos, Carrefour, Aldi, Metro AG and Ito-Yokado abroad. It ran sales offices across seven countries. For roughly fifteen years, if a photograph was taken by somebody who did not care about cameras, there was a decent chance a Concord product took it.

The company tried to follow the market into digital with the Concord Eye-Q range, including a 3.1 megapixel model called the 3045, and it tried to buy its way upmarket in 2004 by acquiring Jenimage Europe and licensing the Jenoptik name for twenty years. That licensing deal is the saddest document in the file. Concord signed up for two decades of a premium German optical brand five years before it stopped existing.

~ what the phone took ~

Concord's position depended on one condition holding: that the cheapest acceptable way to take a photograph was to buy a dedicated object for it. Every part of the business sat on that. The factory in Bao'an, the white-label deals, the rack by the till, the whole single-use category existed because a camera was a thing you had to go and get.

Cameraphones removed the condition rather than competing inside it. By 2007 the phone already in your pocket took pictures good enough for the uses a disposable camera served, at no incremental cost and with no trip to a counter afterward. Companies selling expensive cameras to people who cared about photographs had somewhere to retreat to. Concord, whose entire advantage was being cheaper than caring, had nowhere at all.

~ the last vote ~

By 2008 the company was down to 108 employees from a business that had once supplied most of the large retailers on two continents. On 18 December 2008 the shareholders approved a plan of dissolution and liquidation. Concord ceased trading on 11 May 2009.

The domain is still out there, and concordcam.com now resolves to a page titled "Concord Camera - Bitcoin Profit", which is the standard fate of an expired brand with residual search traffic. Nobody kept the archive and nobody bought the trademark to revive it. The photographs its cameras took are in shoeboxes belonging to people who could not name the manufacturer if you asked them.

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