Last night I got an email from shopify, informing me my Cappy Camera order had been cancelled. It was no glitch. Cappy cameras is no more bringing to end a rather sorry saga in the lo-fi digital community
++++UPDATE18/12/2024++++
The same day (6th December) Shopify had refunded my card painlessly. It took a few days for my evil credit card to show that but Hats off to Shopify.
Cappy Camera was going to enter the market place a simple to use lo-fi digital with switchable filters. It was arguably going to rival the Paper Shoot, not to surprising as it was from the former North American distributor. And I’m guessing the folk at Paper Shoot are now breathing a sigh of relief.
So what’s the story and what went wrong.
In the beginning …….
I’ve covered the background before but in brief….
Back in in 2013 George Lin dreamed up Paper Shoot, a lo-fi eco friendly digital. The original model had a card cover which feature a seed embedded that you could then compost when the camera ‘s life ended. Obviously that wasn’t a wise choice for a camera to be sold on international markets and was later dropped. The camera had slow up take and although successful in Taiwan and neighbouring countries wasn’t really known about in the West
George was great at product design but did seem to struggle with the marketing and distribution.
When I got my first one just 3 years ago, getting it was hard. I had a choice of ordering from Taiwan but they didn’t seem to be able to handle customs or (as I did) I could order from B&H in the US whom at least sorted that out but postage & import was high
But even by then things had started to change. I’d not heard of it but socials savvy daughter had. That’s because a couple of Canadians had started to act as the north American distributors.
That team did socials well and ended up being the whole Americas, UK & Italy suppliers as well. Without doubt they brought the camera to new markets
And then ?
This year there was huge falling out between the Taiwanese parent company. It was highly messy. I’m not going to focus on that and lots of folk have different views but the Canadian team do seem to have much more at fault IMHO, Mainly cos they’d already started to develop the Cappy Camera in secret, Trademarking the name in N.America and selling non official merch and add ons using paper shoot logos.
I covered it here but in brief the Taiwanese pulled their Distributor status and took over sales.
The Cappy camera
The Canadians launched a new company taking pre-orders for the Cappy Camera
Now you might well say that sounds like a Paper Shoot with just a flash and a better battery indicator.
And the company were bigging things up in Social posts. & weeks ago their CEO Gillian Gallant was excitedly telling fans they’d secured an order of 4,750 from an unnamed company. This was big news . That sort of order even if pre-release orders should have secured the future.
But it wasn’t to be.
Any Hints of Woe ?
There were a few clues to potential pointers with hindsight but these weren’t obviously an issue. First they missed their planned launch in November. That in itself wasn’t a major red flag. Lots of companies I’ve bought from via Kickstarters or pre-launches from have had those sorts of issues (the FilmNeverDie Nana is probably my most recent, arriving well after planned launch date).
They did seem to asking for micro-influencers to get involved. again not a red flag but odd for a company that used socials well. and rumour on Reddit suggested they wanted those influencers to pay for shipping (odd but my opinion on influencers is even more hard line so hey ho)
But on the 22nd of November a Reddit user flagged his concerns on the r/papershoot forum. Once again things didn’t immediately sound that worrying he was citing a lack of updates, possible production issues and wondered if a lawsuit was happening (spoiler – more on that in a mo).
But 3 days later on that thread it was posted that Cappy Cameras had cancelled some orders. One user posted an email which he got
“Thank you so much for your recent pre-order of the Cappy Camera. We’re incredibly grateful for your support and enthusiasm for our product. Due to some adjustments in our launch plans, we’ve made the difficult decision to cancel and refund certain pre-orders at this time. While we regret any inconvenience this may cause, we want to assure you that your full refund is being processed immediately and will appear on your original payment method within 5-7 business days.
We’re working hard to ensure the best experience for all our customers, and we look forward to relaunching soon. We’d love for you to stay connected and be among the first to hear about our updated launch in January. As a thank-you for your understanding, we’ll honour any discounts you’ve used and send you an exclusive offer to make your next purchase even more special.”
Now that’s worrying. I was blissfully unaware there was an issue as I was focused on other stuff. That is until I got a refund email from shopify yesterday (6th of December)
“Order #XXXX was canceled because of unforeseen circumstances and your payment has been refunded.”
And I headed to their site which was no longer exists. And there is nothing recent on their socials which still exist for now.
So What Happened ?
I did find an update from their CEO Gillian Gallant on Linkedin posted on the 6th of December. In it she states that everyone in the company including her have lost their jobs. She doesn’t give much detail simply saying they lost their main revenue stream 5 months ago (I assume when the deal with Paper Shoot ended). But the money had run out before they could build new revenue streams.
But then I picked up something from that Reddit thread. On the Paper Shoot had indeed taken legal action filing a trademark dispute in the Court of the Eastern District of Virginia. The case is Paper Shoot Technologies Inc. v. 2763072 Ontario Inc. et al and yup you guessed it Cappy Camera (aka Paper Shoot LLC) is one of the et al.
At this time I couldn’t get access to the US courts PACER system to access the records – classic US not dealing with UK cards again, but looking at the filing sequence it does look like PaperShoot (Taiwan) lawyers successfully filed a temporary restraining order limiting the actions of the defendants on the 21st which could explain the subsequent initial refunding. A hearing was due on the 4th but no court records are listed yet.
But it looks like Cappy Camera have just gone under from Gallant’s post
Is this good or bad for the industry ?
I’m actually torn. On one hand I am a believer in competition helping drive innovation. But on the other I am not surprised that Paper Shoot went to court as the Canny Camera is pretty much a rip off of the Paper shoot.
Had it arrived I suspect the companies could have got locked in a death spiral of competition which wouldn’t be good. My gut was that more folk had sided with Paper Shoot that they would likely win out but it wasn’t sounding healthy for either of them. The market has expanded a lot with the Camp Snap and Flashback ONE now in the fray. And those quite different approach is much healthier in terms of competition rather than some knock off clone.
I acknowledge the benefits of competition in business, but the approach taken by Gillian Gallant and Jack Bisson was unacceptable. They were granted a tremendous opportunity by the founders, yet they chose to act out of greed, self-importance, and entitlement. Repeatedly breaching their contract in various ways, they compromised not only their integrity but also the sales of other distributors, even after being explicitly instructed to cease their disruptive actions. This disregard for their peers, purely for personal gain, is particularly troubling. On top of their breaches, they consistently misrepresented the truth and played the victim, portraying themselves as unfairly targeted, despite clear evidence of their misconduct. Violating a non-compete clause and manipulating facts to suit their narrative is indefensible, and despite their actions, they were offered another chance under a stricter contract, which they rejected. There’s no justifying their actions.
Thanks for sharing the update. My order got cancelled with the same message. The biggest red flag for me was the expectation they had from influencers to start promoting this product before release. They included sample images and product shots and expected us to pre-sell this to trusted followers.