It was a big ask. Raising money in the autumn of 2008, as the financial world was collapsing, was always going to be tough. But raising money to invest in a product that many – including the company that invented it – had written off as redundant? That seemed nigh on impossible. For close to 10 years Polaroid’s factory in Enschede, Holland, had been in a state of managed decline, until in June 2008 the doors finally closed. What by then was the world’s only manufacturer of the white-bordered film had shut. Polaroid’s “instant integral” film – considered one of photographic history’s most brilliant innovations less than 40 years ago – was held to be out of date in the digital age.
So when Florian Kaps, an Austrian entrepreneur, and Andre Bosman, a Dutch former Polaroid manager, invited potential investors to visit Enschede last September to explain why they wanted to put instant film – under a new brand name – back into production, they knew it wouldn’t be easy. “When they came, they were rather sceptical,” says Bosman. “They were certainly not convinced.”
Kaps was already running a website selling the last remaining stocks of Polaroid film. He and Bosman explained that there was a hard core of Polaroid enthusiasts who bought an estimated 10 million packets of film a year. The two men accepted that the market wasn’t big enough to sustain Polaroid in Enschede, with its corporate overheads and 180 employees. But they believed that a scaled-down operation could break even by selling just one million packs of film a year.
Potential investors may or may not have been convinced by the group’s claims that there are one billion functioning Polaroid cameras in existence or that analogue film was undergoing a revival akin to that of vinyl records. But in the end they put up just over €1m because they believed in the people – Bosman had lined up nine former Polaroid employees, all male and most in their fifties, whom he thought had the right spread of skills to get the plant up and running again.
“We as a team just being ourselves, that’s what convinced them, more than the machines,” says Bosman, who is 55. “The lead investor during dinner said to me, ‘I have looked all of your team in the eye and none of them is in here for the money. They are all here to make it happen.’ That is why he thought it was a good idea to reinvent Polaroid as a separate story. We as a team were very convincing.”
. . .
Few of the men involved in the venture – dubbed the Impossible Project, in recognition of the size of the challenge – are shutterbugs. What unites them is a passion not for photography but for the Polaroid product itself. “We love the fact that it’s a unique product that you can identify,” says Bosman. And that Polaroid crops up so often in books, films and advertisements is confirmation of its cult status. But for some of the team, the bond is not so much with the output as with the factory itself, where many of them worked for decades. Most of those who are part of the Impossible Project were just too young to receive a decent unemployment payoff, but too old to retrain. “There was not an alternative for me,” says Henk Minnen, 57, who for 34 years was a production engineer at Polaroid. “I worked as a volunteer in an elderly home after Polaroid was closing.”
Martin Steinmeijer, 51, the resident chemist, had heart surgery in November 2007 and was only working half days during the last months of his 23 years at Polaroid. He retrained as a teacher, but was not relishing the prospect of life outside the factory. “I think it’s a very hard job. I would have been teaching 14- to 15-year-olds. When you have heart surgery you think about those things – it could be a lot of stress. I was very happy that I could get something different.”
The factory “feels like home, almost”, says Nico Dikken, who worked for Polaroid in quality control and as a film operator for almost 25 years. The group is a “family”, agrees Paul Latka, 51, the team’s IT chief. “It was part of my life for 30 years.”
Their allegiance was not swayed even by Polaroid’s slow, drawn-out demise. Sales of instant film peaked with annual sales of 120 million packs of film in the early 1990s. The first big reorganisation at Enschede was in 1999, and every year brought another restructuring. “I had to lay off so many people, so many of my friends,” says Bosman. “Laying off people is not something you should get used to.”
Minnen says that although Polaroid was a good company, “the last years were hard”. Even so, most employees stayed on as long as they could. “I was lucky to do a job that brought the production to a good end. Stopping was a project in itself.” All the materials had to be run down to zero, to prevent leaving a warehouse full of redundant chemicals, plastics and parts.
The same team that managed the decline of Polaroid film is now working to revive it as fast as it can – existing stocks are predicted to run out early next year. Yet this is not Bosman’s first attempt. By 2005, it was obvious to him that Polaroid was going out of business. He tried to persuade his American bosses to scale down production and use the internet to reach the small but loyal band of remaining customers. “The internet was not my expertise but I could see it was a good idea,” says Bosman. But Polaroid wanted its online distribution to succeed without hurting bricks-and-mortar retailers. “That’s a true mission impossible,” says Bosman.
. . .
Not all of the old Polaroid family has made it back into the factory, and there is some lingering resentment among a few of them. Bosman knows it. He covers his face with his hands as he recalls the day he walked back in the factory and – in front of shocked colleagues – halted the scrapping of the machinery, which he himself had ordered. In the space of a few days he and Kaps had persuaded the new factory owner – a property developer – to lease them the building for 10 years and had bought the film production equipment for a “ridiculous amount”, which he says was well below the €100m it was purportedly worth.
Scrapping the machines “was supposed to be my last task here – I was clean-up manager”, says Bosman. The factory had even held a closing ceremony – yet here he was, on the Monday morning after, walking back into the building and ordering the scrapping to stop. The director “was a bit angry”, says Bosman, sheepishly. “Many people were angry with me, which is understandable. For many years we had been planning to stop and people were finally getting used to the idea that in June they would be out of a job. People had been hoping the plant would not close, finally it was real, there was acceptance – and then … a continuation of uncertainty.”
Polaroid was once one of the biggest employers in this small city near the border with Germany, with about 1,200 people in 1990. Few of the 180 people made redundant last June have found new work. When Latka runs into former colleagues, “The first thing they ask is, ‘Do you have a job for me?’”, he says. Yet if Impossible succeeds, these former employees may be disappointed: for the venture to be sustainable in the longer term, younger engineers will have to be trained up.
. . .
For now, that is a problem Impossible would like to have. Even before worrying about whether the community of film enthusiasts and artists is indeed large enough to sustain a functioning business, Impossible has to redesign Polaroid’s instant film product.
One obvious challenge is the battery. One of the reasons there are so many functioning Polaroid cameras still being traded on sites such as Ebay – often for less than a single packet of 600 film – is that they did not use batteries: each Polaroid film cartridge contained its own power supply. That was another great Polaroid innovation in the 1970s, when charges were short and rechargeable batteries not yet invented, but throwing a battery away every 10 photos is environmentally unconscionable today. Impossible is working on a rechargeable battery for the film, but they admit they haven’t worked out how that will work financially – it could add an off-putting upfront cost to a product of which they expect even enthusiasts to buy just three or four packs a year.
But other difficulties are more fundamental. Polaroid was, by today’s standards, an unusually vertically integrated company. It designed all its components and owned most of its supply chain, in part to protect its intellectual property. And the proprietary components run down to minute details. Every spring in the film cartridge was made not from standard steel but steel rolled for that particular application. The small tab that allows the photographer to pull an empty cartridge out of the camera is made from plastic made especially for that tab. Even the plastic resin from which the cartridge is made has its own patent (albeit not one owned by Polaroid).
“All these things we have to replace and find new solutions for,” says Bosman with a sigh, “because none of the existing suppliers can be used.” One potential chemicals supplier, a factory in New Orleans, had been wiped out by Hurricane Katrina. “If you run a car and one wheel falls off, you still have three wheels, but you can’t drive it any more,” says Bosman. “People ask what is the most important material, but [if] any material is missing, you don’t have a product.”
So to revive this most analogue of products, Impossible is turning to digital media. The company’s website www.the-impossible-project.com not only provides Polaroid fanatics with pictures of the factory and T-shirts to buy, but also a list of particular challenges to which Impossible hopes someone, somewhere might have a solution. The current, typically obscure component in question is a “latex timing layer”. “We are getting a lot of response,” says Bosman. “Retired Polaroid researchers are writing me recipes. But at the same time that is a problem. How do you filter whether it’s a good solution or not?”
. . .
The extended Impossible family may be working hard to revive instant film, but for now, the old Polaroid factory remains largely quiet. The din and chemical stench of the factory floor have yet to be set off for anything but the briefest of mechanical tests. Most of the action today happens in small, bland offices, where dozens of white-framed photos are scattered on desks in various states of development. In the corridors, incongruous American motivational posters line the walls, flanked by trophy cabinets full of pristine Polaroid products.
The detritus of 30 years of Polaroid manufacturing still litters the factory, from the rainbow-liveried tricycle cart used to ferry parts from the store room, to the blonde mannequin in matching red hat and blouse that has been used to test-photograph every new batch of film since the 1970s. There are also pallets of shrink-wrapped Polaroid goods – boxed, leatherbound SX-70 cameras and even video camcorders.
But the machinery needs to be back in action soon if Impossible is to meet its 2010 deadline. The urgency is not simply one of funding (although as it pays the same wages as Polaroid used to, Impossible is looking to raise more cash). Bosman, Kaps and their team are desperate to release new stocks of film before the last supplies expire. If they don’t, even dedicated Polaroid aficionados might skip Ebay altogether and put their cameras straight in the trash. As well as investors’ – and their own – money, there is considerable pride at stake. “When it succeeds you are proud,” says Minnen. “You can say to people we have made it, we can do it. My wife and my son, they live with the whole group. They are always asking, ‘What did you do, when can you make the first pictures?’”
Talking to the men dreaming the Impossible dream, it is clear that every day working on the project is one they never thought they’d see even a year ago – and so no day should be wasted. “We would be very disappointed if we don’t succeed,” says Latka.
Around 5pm, as I take a final walk around the factory, I run into Steinmeijer, the delicate-hearted chemist. He looks upset. Had I asked too many questions? Was I in the way? “We just did another test and it didn’t work so well,” he says at last. “And we spilled developer all over the equipment. But that’s just part of it all. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
He turns off the light in the factory, walks back down the stairs, and out of the same door he’s walked out of for 23 years, desperately hoping he’ll be doing it for a few more, at least.
Tim Bradshaw is the FT’s digital media correspondent
