Unfortunately, Rigu will not have a stand at The Photography Show 2026 at the NEC.
Around this time of year I start getting questions from people asking if Rigu will be exhibiting at the show. I just bought my train ticket to be a visitor, so I thought it was a good idea to let people know ahead of time, so that they don’t hold back on placing an order if they were planning on picking something up at the NEC.
For most people I’m sure that’s all you need to know, but if you’d like to hear a bit about the reasons for this decision I’ll expand on them below.
To be clear from the outset, this is not the fault of TPS. It’s a good show, it’s well run, and I do think their prices are pretty reasonable for what you get. Compared to other shows I’ve been invited to you are paying a lot less per visitor for a really targeted demographic of camera users with good staff support. We’re lucky to have something like TPS in the UK at a time when tradeshows are becoming rarer.
Okay, enough beating around the bush, why isn’t Rigu at The Photography Show in 2026?
It’s a big disruption for a small business
Rigu is a small business that has a wide variety of niche products and people expect me to be carrying a wide variety on the stand despite us clearly having a fairly small space. I don’t have the exact numbers but I’m sure we had more than 300 different models of product available last time, and of course multiples of each model to sell, so we’re well over 1000 products being stored in that 3m by 2m space with extras kept in the van so we can restock each morning.
A lot of planning goes into what to take, how many of each item to take, how it will be stored, and crucially how much is left back in the stock room at the office to keep everything going whilst we’re at the show.
That’s a big disruption, and it requires a lot of investment in stock throughout the months leading up in the hopes that we sell enough that I’m not then overstocked for the rest of the year (because different things sell well at the show compared to online).
In those 4 days at the show, the sales tend to be around the same as a good month on the website. That’s a lot of transactions to compress into 4 days, and a lot of product that needs to be moved.
Beyond just the logistical aspects, I have to ask my brother to look after the online side of the business whilst I’m away, and my partner Liz takes time off work to help on the stand. That means I’m asking other people to disrupt their own lives for my benefit. A larger company with multiple staff can probably spread themselves better to maintain regular service so that there’s less of an impact. Perhaps I was over-ambitious trying to have such a wide range of products on a small stand.
The show is very stressful & draining
I don’t think I realised when I first went just how full-on it would be as an experience. From show opening at 10 to closing at 5 we get surrounded by people on 3 sides of the stand, sometimes with a bit of a crowd forming.
All day I’m rotating on the stand answering questions whilst Liz takes the payments. We’ve estimated that I’ll have a couple of hundred conversations per day. On a few occasions someone will ask a question, I start telling them the answer then look up and realise I’m doing a product demo to a dozen people. As someone that is usually in an office on their own, this isn’t something I’m really used to.
There’s no chance to really eat lunch, Liz forces a water bottle into my hands every so often, and no time to nip to the loo either. Any downtime between conversations I’m straightening up the stand, checking stock levels, or doing other admin. I’ve had a lot of comments from other exhibitors saying how busy our stand is, so I’m not sure if our experience is out of the ordinary or not, but I found it absolutely exhausting.
I know how this sounds, I’m complaining about being busy. I chose to have a stand that gives us the maximum frontage, and I chose to bring lots of different products, so I’ve created a situation where we’re attractive to a wide variety of photographers. I’ve noticed that there’s also not a huge amount of stands selling products on the day, and I’m sure lots of people want to leave the show with something, and Rigu products fit the bill well for that, which probably contributes to the amount of people that visit the stand more than once in a day.
If there was potentially another person on the stand that might alleviate some pressure, but as you can see from the pics above, there’s not really space for a 3rd person, so the other options would be to sell a smaller variety of products, or to have less customer facing sides to the stand so that we’re dealing with less people at the same time. Adding a person adds significant cost (wages, travel, accommodation), restricting product ranges or the amount of stand frontage reduces what we’d sell and makes breaking or becoming profitable harder. There’s probably a balance to be struck, and I’m sure I’d get better at this if I was doing it more often, but there’s not that many opportunities in the UK to exhibit my kind of products.
Thefts are upsetting
Being an ecommerce business, thefts are rare. There’s occasionally what I’d think of as minor fraud by customers, but generally I’m quite lucky. At the show we have experienced theft a number of times.
I want people to be able to handle the merchandise, but if they can handle it they can steal it, and our stand has 3 sides so we can’t monitor everything all the time.
Being a one-person business, it’s hard not to take it personally when someone decides to steal from your stand, because it’s going to impact me personally. These people may have probably had a conversation with me, or possibly even bought from me in the past, and they still think they should take something from my stand.
People have stolen bags, torches, light painting tools, books, and straps. Everything that gets stolen makes it harder to make a profit at the show, and harder to justify coming back.
People ask for discounts constantly
It doesn’t matter what the price is, or if I’ve already got a promotion in place, a lot of people still want a “deal”. I suspect for a lot of people it’s just a game, but it gets boring very quickly, and my responses do get more frustrated over the process of the show. It’s not a big thing, but it does grind me down a bit when I already pride myself on offering fair value all year round to people and don’t run Black Friday or Boxing Day sales. People at the show don’t know that though, so it’s understandable that they don’t care when we’ve all been trained over the years to expect a cycle of sales and show specials.
Don’t even get me started on influencers…
It is not profitable.
This is the big one. I could probably get over all the things above if we were leaving the NEC driving home on the Tuesday night with a healthy profit, but unfortunately that doesn’t happen.
Working out profit and value from the show is quite hard because there’s no real way of knowing just how many people end up placing an order after the show based on seeing the Rigu stand, and how much value I should put on “brand awareness.”
I do know that on both of the times I’ve exhibited that sales at the show have not covered the costs. This was to be expected the first time I exhibited, because there was a lot of stuff that needed to be bought and built to has a show-ready stand. There was also the Queen’s funeral which cancelled one of the days and naturally had an impact on our takings. With those sunk costs out of the way and having a full 4 trading days I thought year two would be profitable, but it wasn’t.
Having done two years on, and one year off (missing the London show in 2025), looking at my revenue trends I suspect that there’s not that much follow-on business after the show for a company like Rigu, but it’s incredibly hard to really know what impact it has.
Perhaps a few people were more likely to buy a HoldFast MoneyMaker after trying it on at the show, but not enough to make it a noticeable after-show bump.
Camera companies, service companies, and “big ticket” products probably do better at this than someone selling camera straps and filters at affordable prices. Companies that have lots of experience will know how to be more efficient, and companies that produce their own products will have better margins than I do as an importer of niche goods, so it was always going to be hard.
Will I try again in the future?
I’ll never say never. Even with all the reasons not to do it, there’s still part of me that feels like I should be able to make this work. It not working makes me think I’m doing something wrong, and that’s frustrating.
There is a good buzz to the show, and it is fun talking to lots of people, and seeing people interact with the products. Other than a handful of people visiting the office here in the Lakes this is the only chance I get to meet customers and that is really enjoyable, it makes me think that if it broke even I’d go again. When I look at how I allocate my time and marketing budget, it just doesn’t seem sensible and rational to keep going to the show unless I can find a better way to do it.
Hopefully this post hasn’t come across as whiny or too much of a pity party. I’ve wanted to get my thoughts on this written down for a while and think it’s good to be honest and transparent with customers since a lot of social media and customer interaction tends to only be about the positive aspects of running a business.
If you enjoyed this post and think it would be interesting to read more “behind the scenes” type posts please do leave a comment or get in touch directly if you want to chat about it more.
