interview with hideki ohmori of powershovel : part two
In the United States, your company has a compassionate following, but it can sometimes be hard for Americans to actually get one of your cameras, what are your plans for the American market over the next few years?
Actually, we just opened an office in N.Y.. This will increase accessibility for American people to our products, including cameras, books, and CDs, and to our events with music/videos/photos themes, which we have been holding frequently in Japan.
Who would you say is the core market for Powershovel? What type of person to you target your products to?
In today’s market, I sense a difficulty in limiting the target only by age or gender. Well, if I state our target in a broad sense, those would be people who are bored with existing, mainstream market. Someone who knows that the world is not just black and white. We always wish those people to support our products, and we believe people like that exist in every generation and gender. That person may not be the most popular kid in school, and may often look bored, people that make an effort and explore for their interests and passion. Those are the people we want to be accepted by.
It seems that film photography is making a very large comeback in Asia, and is starting to in the US. What amount of film vs. digital do you see in the next few years?
Digital will dominate the scene. Sooner or later, the ratio of film vs digital would be the one like CD and vinyl records. But, no matter how much the portion of film photography shrinks, it will exist forever.
Your products are leading the return to film cameras, but I hear that you are planning a small digital ‘Toy Camera,’ what was the inspiration behind that, and can you tell us when it may come to market?
We saw another type of nostalgia in toyish digital camera because of its low-fi image and weird color balance. It has different taste from film camera. So we casted that nostalgia in to shape with our first digital camera, ‘Digital Harinezumi’, which we are working to release in March, 2009. We were also missing the ability to record moving images, so we tried to approximate the movie quality to that of super 8mm films.
You have audio and book sections of your company, how do you divide your time between each, and what role do they play with each other?
We like editing books very quickly, in three days at most. But then collecting the photographs might take very long. The record label is managed by any of us individually, the person that proposes a particular record is the one with the task of producing it. Right at this second, someone here might be mailing about testing samples for a new camera products, next second, he would make a phone call about promotion for photo collections, and another second, he would schedule date for mastering CD. So all works of every sections run simultaneously, seamlessly, intimately connected.
Your design is the best in the business, and seems to be inspired by nature. Where do you find the inspiration for the design of your cameras?
Thank you. Maybe nature inspires me, because the human beings’ creativity has always been originated from being nature-oriented. We maybe following that traditional passage of creation without consciously recognizing.
What message do you have for our American readers?
We now have a office in the States, which wasn’t a part of my primary plan. But, I immediately decided to take our business to America when I first landed there half a year ago, actually for my first time. I am extremely excited of what will happen from now on. America, I’m sure will influence us in multiple dimensions and those influences will transform our products. So a new phase seems to be beginning now. Thanks very much for liking what we do.
Some great PowerShovel and Superheadz links:
Special thanks to all that helped with the translations, and to all of the great people at PowerShovel for their continued support of Film and Toy Cameras. I will post more information on the New York office and US distribution as soon as I have it, and will be visiting with the team in NYC in March.