Creative Memories to enter the digital scrapbooking market?

There is a thread over at Two Peas on the topic of Creative Memories entering the digital market, and since I ended up writing an essay on it (LOL!) I figured I should post it here, rather than neglecting my poor little blog. If you'd leave me a comment so I know someone is visiting, I'd appreciate it!

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At first, my reaction was the same as most of y'all... but then I took a step back to think about the CM "angle" as it were.

Although their design choices are a bit behind the times, and I've decided I don't like the strap-hinge style of album (I'm all about the top-load, now!), you have to respect their paradigm ~~ they are all about making it quick and easy to get those photos into the albums so they can be enjoyed.

Their 'call to arms' about acid-free, lignin-free and all that is all about making sure those photos last through time. And although their style is pretty bland, they are all about formulas and using tools to make it quick and easy to get the pages DONE and in the books, rather than agonizing over every photo placement. And who, among us paper-scrappers, didn't appreciate those formulas when we first started out? All those papers and stickers at the LSS would make anyone tremble with indecision!

And you cannot dispute that their tools (although a bit pricey) are absolutely top-notch! Although I don't care about their albums, papers or stickers, that personal cutting system, the personal photo trimmer and the shape-makers are the mainstays of my scrapbooking tool tote!

OK, to the digital point ~~ they are learning (as the camera companies are too) that the world is going DIGITAL ~~ at least as far as photos go. Online photo developers are popping up like weeds ~~ and the traditional film development places are trying to get their piece of the pie, too. It would be FOOLISH of CM to ignore this very basic fact about the whole "Memory Marketplace".

Now while many of us on the pea-board are spoiled rotten by the fabulously creative and talented scrappers and designers in the digi-world, you have to admit, that at times, Art is a bit at odds with the Utility part of Memory Keeping. If you are spending hours on a layout, you're not going to get very many of them done.

In another post about the costs of digi vs. paper scrapping someone mentioned how much more productive she was with digi, so that justified the expense. And I have to concur. One of the major time savings I have founds is just keeping up with photos. No dropping off or picking up film, no need for boxes with divider tabs, afternoons spent labeling them carefully with my soft-leaded pencil ~~ they're all on my PC, already tagged with the date they were taken.

Organizing photos digitally seems like a natural match for CM. And although we may look down our noses at their 'art' or lack thereof, if CM starts to produce digital "kits" along the lines of their papers and stickers, I can see where a lot of folks would give it a go. In their paper line, you can buy papers, stickers and matching photo-safe pens in coordinating color families, I can see how the same sort of approach to digital products could be very attractive to a 'weekend scrapper' who has limited time to churn out a lot of pages.

In the current digi-community, it can be quite overwhelming just deciding which software package to buy, then add on some hardware issues and it can definitely be a good reason to quit and go back to paper for some folks. Although the average CM consultant isn't equipped to help much, they could be doing some serious consultant training on their own in-house SW to minimize that. (It could happen!!)

Just a few of my thoughts on the whole thing... it's a multi-million dollar pie, everyone is going to want a piece!

POSTSCRIPT ~~ did a little poking around to find out what CM was really doing ~~ they have a new software package called Memory Manager which is really more of a digital photo management software with the capability to do some very elementary scrapbook layouts including journal boxes. Read more about it and view the demo here