I hate raising prices, and avoid doing it as much as possible.
The Royal Mail have raised my postage prices a few times over the last couple of years, and it’s finally reached a point where I can’t take the additional cost any longer without passing it on to customer. Special Delivery options especially seem to have jumped up.
These aren’t massive price rises, but I think it’s only fair to be transparent and let people know when things like this happen rather than sneaking it through and hoping no one notices.
“Free delivery” with a signature required is now 79p
Upgrading to Royal Mail 24 is now £2.50 extra
Royal Mail 24 with a signature required is £3.30 extra
Special Delivery Next Day by 1pm is £9 extra for package under 1kg, and £13.99 for over 1kg.
The majority of customers opt for the “free delivery” option anyway, so for most people it’s business as usual, and hopefully it will be feasible to maintain a free delivery option on all orders for the foreseeable future.
This is a quick reminder that Rigu uses the Royal Mail to send out almost all orders, and as the Royal Mail do not collect or deliver on Bank Holidays it is not possible for me to send out orders on Good Friday or Easter Monday.
All orders placed after today’s 3pm collection will be sent on Tuesday April 7th.
Email/social responses will be slower than usual during the long weekend, as I won’t be in the office, no one will answer the phone.
It’s always nice to get a restock from Simplr, topping up the inventory of their excellent minimal camera straps.
In amongst the restocks there was also a new item; the W2 wrist strap.
As you can see it’s a very simple wrist strap with no bells and whistles, just everything you need to keep your camera on your wrist with nothing to get in the way, but built tough and durable so you know you can trust the strap with your precious camera gear.
There was also a small restock of the limited edition Coyote Brown “Relic” F1Ultralight strap. Simplr have made this in coyote brown before, but I think it’s the first time it has been available in the relic fabric, which is a slightly softer nylon that feels a bit more “broken in” when you receive it compared to the standard F1Ultralights.
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.
Stretch has been one of my favourite filter styles since it was introduced at Rigu a couple of years ago. It’s great at making your subject the centre of attention and artfully removing distractions from the sides of your composition.
If you’re a photographer or videographer that’s working with larger lenses that have big front elements, this sizing is going to make working with Stretch a lot more accessible and usable in your projects. The standard sizes were probably a bit too small in some cases, forcing you to use the full blurring sections in all your compositions. A larger filter with a 30mm wide flat section (where the image will appear “normal”) gives considerably more wiggle room to fit your subject/subjects into the frame and use the blurred sections a bit more subtly. Or pull it away from the lens a bit to get more blurring into the frame and use the filter more aggressively.
This works both ways too, if you’re working with smaller lenses, then this might not be the right solution for you. When I was playing around with this 100mm wide filter and with a small lens on my DSLR I found in some cases I couldn’t see the blurring effect at all depending on my focal length. It’s no problem though, since the smaller version exists, so now Rigu has a range that’s suitable for a wider range of lenses and uses.
Here’s a quick little product announcement: lug bumpers!
If you use a strap with metal split rings, you’ll probably know the issue. After a while, the metal rubs against the camera body and starts to wear the paint or finish around the strap eyelets.
These lug bumpers sit between the ring and the camera, acting as a soft barrier. They’re cut from offcuts of leather from strap production, so it’s a nice way to use material that would otherwise just sit in a box or get thrown away.
They’re available in both genuine leather and vegan leather options, and in a mix of colours.
One of the interesting things about the vegan leather is that they’re not made of “PU leather” (aka plastic), they’re 95% olive, produced from the waste left over from olive oil production. It’s a more sustainable leather alternative that looks and feels nice, whilst also being strong. As it is quite a thin leather I’m not convinced it would work as a camera strap, but it’s very suitable for lug bumpers and hopefully some other accessories too.
Rigu has been offering vegan leather camera straps for a few years, and over the past year I’ve been slowly learning more about leathercraft. It’s an interesting process which I’ve always gone through with an eye on eventually offering Rigu’s own leather camera straps after over a decade of importing and selling other brands.
I naively started out thinking “well, it can’t be that expensive.” I was kind of right, getting setup with a minimal leathercrafting kit isn’t that expensive, but as with most hobbies, once you go down the rabbit hole there is always something else to buy.
I realised that there are certain things I can do, and certain things I can’t; and if I want to sell a high-quality product then I can’t rely entirely on my hands and eyes to ensure a good finish. Creating jigs and guides, or using machines where needed is key to offering products that are consistent. This in turn means that I should make less mistakes in the manufacturing process, which means less wastage, and ultimately lower prices for customers. It’s still a very hands-on process, but trying to remove some aspects of human error whilst keeping it a “handmade” product seems like a good balance to strike.
The die cutter above arrived this week. It’s a big heavy pair of metal plates which your put your material (such as leather) and cutter between, pull the lever, listen for the satisfying cut, and then you’ve got a perfectly shaped piece of leather for your project. For something like camera straps where there’s quite a lot of repetition between products I can see this being really useful.
Whilst I’m having fun playing around with this die cutter and the new cutting method it brings to the workshop, really this is an investment in providing more value to customers when I eventually begin to offer in-house leather camera straps at Rigu.
I think it ticks all the boxes for newbies and experienced light painters; providing all the fundamentals in an affordable package.
Excellent build quality
4 lighting modes (3 different strengths and a strobe function)
Long-lasting battery with internal USB-C charging
Crucially, a good sized head for attaching to the LPB universal connector
I’ve always been a bit of a reluctant torch seller, but after years of being asked by customers what torch I’d recommend, I felt like I had to offer an option to people. There are definitely other options out there which are better at specific tasks for (check out Stephen Knight’s incredible roundup), but remember that Rigu is a camera accessories shop, not a flashlight shop, so offering a solid and reliable all-rounder was my #1 aim when picking what to stock.
Whilst Rigu news has to go where the audience is, and that’s usually Facebook, Instagram, or X, I think it might be fun to get back into blogging about the business.
At the very least, it will give me a record of what is happening at Rigu that’s on my own platform, not one owned by a billionaire, or fed to people through an algorithm. If you’re here reading this, it’s because you want to be, not because an equation decided you might like it.
Quick story about the photo above. I was walking around the Ginza district in Tokyo taking photos in early 2024 when an Irish man called Enda shouted “I know, I know, I’ll take your photo with your camera!” He rushed over and let his bike crash to the ground, we had a chat about why I was wandering around Ginza on my own, and he gave me a beer from his bag, encouraging me to have it on the metro ride back to my hotel.
It was a bit of an odd encounter, but it was great to chat to someone after almost a week of being in China & Japan and not having any conversations beyond ordering food & drink.
The range of cotton and neoprene DSLR camera straps available from iMo has expanded with a recent delivery of stock. This takes the range of straps available from this fun Hong Kong based design company to 30, with a wide range of patterns and styles available.
As always with iMo, you get comfort and style with a strap that is strong enough to carry any camera setup. Each strap has been tested to carry more than 40kg, and I think you’ll agree that if you camera body and lens weigh more than 40kg, you’re probably not going to wear it around your neck or on your shoulder.
I swap around my camera straps quite a lot as I like to test out a few different items from the site, but I do frequently return to the neoprene backed straps from iMo as they’re so comfortable. Having the quick release integrated into the strap is also really convenient if you’re out with your tripod doing some long exposures and don’t want the strap in the way or flapping around in the wind.
Rigu is the only seller of iMo products in the UK, making it the quickest, easiest, and cheapest way to buy one of their colourful and fun straps. Check out the range here.
