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.
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.
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.
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.
When Rigu launched it had 10 camera straps available. Today it’s around 300, which is the most in the UK (probably the most in Europe too), catering to almost every kind of photographer.
Different connection types, styles, and materials mean that Rigu needs to stock a lot of straps to cover what everyone needs, but that can make it harder for people to find what is right for them.
If you look at the camera straps category on the site, that’s a lot of options. Some people aren’t sure what they want, so are happy to browse and see what’s on offer. Other people know what they’re looking for and want it to be broken down further so they can see what’s available, and what will work with their camera. Rigu has always had a number of categories, but I have felt for a while that this system could be improved to make the growing selection more manageable.
Over the weekend I created a number of new categories and went through every single strap that is available on the site to re-categorise them. To be frank, it was very boring, but hopefully it will have been a productive few hours if I see people working their way through the site easier.
These new categories have also allowed me to bring together items in collections that were previously under-represented. Rigu doesn’t have a huge amount of vegan camera straps yet (though this is something I am looking to improve over the next few months), but at least now it is easy for vegan photographers to find a quality camera strap that they can be confident includes no animal products.
Similarly, I felt it was important to break down the straps in terms of what connection type they have, since if you’re looking for a lug/ring connection strap then there’s no point you looking at flat mounts (even though most of these come with rings which does complicate matters), string loop connection or tripod mount straps. This should make the process of finding the right strap a bit easier for photographers.
A number of other categories were also added (materials, and styles of strap being the major ones) which I believe should cover most of what people are searching for. If people were searching for it on the site in large enough numbers, I made a category for it, and that seems like a sensible way to deal with this.
This whole categorisation process is a work in progress and there are other things I would like to try. I would like the ability to combine categories, such as allowing people to choose lug mount straps that are also leather, but this is an additional complication that will take work. I recognise that too many categories might be a bad thing, and that it instead of making it easier, it might make the navigation process more complicated and confusing. It’s a balancing act, and I will be monitoring the stats to see if these new categories are being used and providing value to customers. Only time will tell and if you feel anything is missing or there are other categories that could be useful I’ll consider adding them into the site.
I’m looking to bring a number of new brands to Rigu over the next few months, making a wider range of camera strap (and other products) available. Hopefully, this will mean that Rigu will have something for everyone, at every budget.
I’ve seen Heavy Leather NYC come up a few times in my travels around the internet and always admired their straps, especially their Slingshot strap (available in black or brown). It was that item that first drew me to the brand and I’m glad to have them on the site now, making Rigu their first ever European distributor.
Slings are something that I feel are a bit underrepresented with it comes to camera straps. A lot of people want to be able to wear a strap across their body, and most standard neck straps are just a little bit too short for that.
If you look for sling straps, the options are typically fairly limited, uninspiring, and very much focused on function rather than looking good. The Slingshot by Heavy Leather NYC is that most unusual combo, form and function. It’s good looks draw on their years of experience crafting guitar straps for people like Prince, Black Sabbath, and Lemmy from Motorhead, whilst also maintaining security by layering the main leather belt on top of nylon. You wouldn’t see it at first glance, but it’s there and it keeps this strap extra secure. The padded shoulder pad keeps this extra comfy, helping you get through a day of shooting.
As I say, Rachael, the owner of Heavy Leather, has a lot of experience with guitar straps and it’s fair to say that it’s mostly a guitar brand. I don’t want to stereotype rock and metal metal as being one thing or aesthetic, but that experience seems to bring something else to the straps when it comes to the design style that I don’t usually get from a camera brand. It’s a look that I haven’t had at Rigu before, and I’m glad to have it.
With Heavy Leather being mostly a guitar brand, it does mean their camera strap range isn’t huge, so I have abandoned my “dip the toe in the water” process that I usually have with new brands, and stocked their entire range from day one. Quantities are relatively limited, but everything is available and this is the best way for me to judge what items people like and get valuable feedback by having everything available.
By making Heavy Leather products available in the UK, Rigu has once again made it easier, faster, and cheaper to get hold of high-quality camera straps that would have otherwise required long waits for customs, import charges, and hassle in the event of needing to deal with customer services. Fundamentally, Rigu aims to make the process of getting cool things easier for photographers, so if you have seen a product and thought “I want it, but I don’t want to have to import it” get in touch and maybe it can become a Rigu product.
If you are a customer, shopping with Rigu has largely been the same over the past couple of months as normal. However, as I have only visited the office a handful of times since my last coronavirus-related post, it definitely doesn’t feel normal to me, and I just want to update people on how Rigu is doing.
Here’s where we’re at with operations at the moment:
My brother Neil is doing an excellent job getting orders sent out to the same schedule as I would normally achieve on weekdays. In this regard, nothing has changed.
The Royal Mail are doing well, and most orders are arriving within the expected delivery estimate, but there has been an increase in orders which have been arriving late. This often appears to be packages sitting at depots for an extended period. My presumption is that this is due to a reduction in capacity at depots in both the ability to sort and deliver mail and is dependent on the area you’re in. I should reiterate that most orders are arriving within the expected timeframe, but order earlier than usual if you need an item by a certain date.
Special Delivery services are still not available as an upgrade as the Royal Mail are not able to guarantee that timeframe, and I would rather not make it available than have disappointed customers.
Customer service e-mails are being responded to quicker than usual, as I am sat at home and there’s less to do here than in the office.
You are not able to contact me via the office phone number (as I’m not there), all enquiries are to be made via e-mail or social media, please.
Officially, the personalised camera strap service is not available. However, that hasn’t stopped a couple of people ordering it anyway, and in those cases me and Neil have found a workaround so that I can safely go to the workshop and personalise the strap after which Neil then packs it and preps for postage. It’s not something I want to be doing regularly (it’s an 80 minute round-trip drive to the office) but if you really need a personalised strap, it can be worked into the schedule I have for taking shopping to my family.
One thing I have been enjoying recently is going for lots of walks around the local area, and taking my camera with me too. On these walks I’ve had plenty chances to listen to business podcasts and think about ways I can improve Rigu. I am looking at new brands to bring to the site, and thinking about ways to make the site more efficient, more usable, and better for customers.
Hopefully for all the ways that coronavirus has held Rigu back over the past couple of months, it will provide a chance to focus on other aspects of the business that often get neglected because I have to deal with day-to-day issues and jobs.
As ever, thank you very much to everyone who is placing orders at the moment. I recognise that it’s a time of great uncertainty in all aspects of life, especially financially, and as I said at the start of all this, I understand that a nice camera strap is not at the top of most people’ priorities. I can only assume that there are a lot of people who have had a chance to reconnect with photography and now that they’re spending more time with their camera they want to be comfortable (and look good) whilst they’re taking photos, and I truly appreciate those people visiting Rigu.
At the end of February I had a trip to Tokyo. Originally, this was so that I could go to the CP+ tradeshow in Yokohama to find new suppliers and interesting products for Rigu. The show was cancelled due to (understandable) coronavirus concerns a couple of weeks before I was due to leave, but I felt it was still possible for the trip to be worthwhile as long as I took precautions whilst I was out there to ensure my own safety as well as others. In Japan the COVID-19 response was very impressive, which sanitiser available at the entrance of the vast majority of shops, cafes and restaurants. Being a solo traveller my contact with other people was fairly limited, and with the city being much quieter than usual, it was possible to move around without being packed into trains like sardines to ensure a fair distance from other people.
Anyway, this isn’t a travel blog. Tokyo is a very, very photogenic city. Almost everywhere you turn you will find something that is interesting to photograph, and I decided to take a couple of Fractal Filters along with me as I thought they would be fun to use in places like Akihabara and Shinjuku that have lots of bright signs and colourful lights.
One important thing to remember about Fractal Filters and travel is that they need to go in checked/hold luggage. If you get to security with these in your hand luggage they WILL be confiscated since they look like a knuckle duster and are a big lump of glass. I can’t think of anything fun to shoot with them in an airport or during a long-haul flight so you aren’t missing out on much.
In my previous post about the Fractals my aim was to use them in a fairly minimal and subtle way most of the time. In Tokyo it was very much the opposite. Many areas of the city are an assault on the senses and the Fractals amplified that with really interesting results. Some of the shots were chaotic, almost creating an abstract pattern that was unrecognisable from the reality of the scene, whereas others drew focus to a specific point.
Personally, I’ve always felt that the Fractals work best when you have a subject in frame between 6-15 feet from you, which is why I love using them for portrait photography, but if you’re going to Tokyo and you own Fractals, you’re going to take them. Using them for landscapes or street scenes like these can be fairly hit-or-miss and there were plenty of occasions when I knew they wouldn’t be appropriate. As ever, the Fractals are a tool, and no tool suits every situation. They are fun to play around with though, and it’s nice knowing that my touristy photos of Tokyo are fairly unique.
As an aside, the Fractal prisms did have one unexpected side-benefit whilst I was in Tokyo. Personal connection. I’ve visited Japan three times, once with a friend, once with my partner, and this time on my own. Being on your own in one of the largest metropolis’ on the planet can be quite a lonely experience. English is more widely spoken than when I first visited in 2007, but generally it’s rare to engage in a conversation with a stranger.
The Fractals seemed to break down that barrier, people were curious about the lumps of glass I was wiggling in front of my lens and I would show them the back of camera and the effect the prisms created. It was nice to have a brief conversation with someone that wasn’t serving me my lunch for a change. Japan has a lot of photography & camera shops, but creative items like the Fractals are still rare and it was fun that people took an interest.
Rigu is the UK & Europe’s only distributor of the Fractal Filters, offering quick despatch and delivery, with no customs import hassles. They are listed on Amazon.co.uk, but they’re under the global shipping programme, so you would be waiting for them to come from the US, and you’d be paying more.
Compared to purchasing direct from the manufacturer you will save money (before and after factoring in customs import charges) as well as benefiting from much quicker delivery and UK customer support.
There’s been quite a lot of changes in the world recently due to the coronavirus, and that has also affected Rigu. At times like this I understand that camera straps aren’t most people’s top priority, but the shop does remain open and ready to send out orders.
I (Andy) am working from home, but Neil, my brother who usually takes over whilst I’m working away from Cumbria or on holiday, will be sending out orders for me. My office and stock room is based where he lives and works normally, so this doesn’t create unnecessary travel or connections with other people beyond the norm. We have also discussed measures to help protect the Royal Mail when visiting the office to ensure that contact is kept to an absolute minimum as they are at fairly high risk in terms of spreading COVID-19. There is the possibility that the Royal Mail will stop their collections to the office, which would be an understandable situation, and at that point the only option would be to stop orders.
As is the case at other times when he’s been in charge, there are no personalised straps available at the moment. Neil has seen the burns the stamping machine has given me on occasion (thankfully a rare experience now that I’m used to the machine) and isn’t keen to learn how to use it in my absence.
Other than that, Rigu will continue mostly as normal. The nature of ecommerce is that some of it can be done remotely, if not with the same efficiency (I can only do so much on a laptop compared to my desktop). To be frank being able to keep working on Rigu is something that will hopefully provide an aspect of normalcy in strange times, and I’m sure my partner will appreciate me keeping busy whilst we’re staying home.
