Where’s the World’s Most Remote Camera Store? In This Place
News | By Stephan Jukic | August 27, 2022
Camera stores normally open up in the busiest part of whatever city or town they’re located in, but sometimes exceptions happen. What U.K camera store chain WEX has done in Wales, in the United Kingdom is definitely an extreme one.
The brand has recently opened a tiny store branch on top of a mountain in Wales called Moel Hebog, smack in the middle of Snowdonia National Park, miles from any town, city, village or even roads of any kind. In fact, the only way to reach the store without flying is on foot, and only that after hiking a long way.
Why would WEX do such a thing? The obvious reason is a bit of marketing, that was accomplished just in time for World Camera Day on August 19th. This allowed the company to honestly declare their new branch the “United Kingdom’s most remote camera store”.
The tiny location isn’t just a façade with the brand’s logo either. According to a company announcement on the WEX website, “Sitting atop Moel Hebog, the store boasted everything you’ve come to expect from us — a fantastic selection and cameras, tripods, and lenses, with our staff on hand to give intrepid customers the kind of expert advice they rely on us for,”
According to the brand, it was their understanding of photographer habits through a recent survey about how they take photos that made the company plop a retail location down on top of a remote mountain.
As WEX explains its findings, “About 40% of you were proudly happy to risk life and limb by climbing over safety barriers, suffering sunburn, or exposing yourself to insect bites and stings — as long as it resulted in a good picture.” The survey also showed that more than half of British respondents indicated that “having a good time was secondary to taking a good photo”.
Other findings from the company’s survey showed that 22% of respondents sometimes missed out on time with family or friends for the sake of capturing good photos and that many obsessed over capturing a great photograph to the point of being reduced to tears, or repeating the same composition dozens of times for the sake of getting it “just right”.
These are all sentiments that many of us who take our photography seriously can sympathize with, but what do they have to do with putting a store in the middle of a wilderness?
WEX says that having the store in just such an absurdly isolated place was a perfect symbolic representation of what lengths photographers will go to for a great picture. In their words,
“By opening our store on Moel Hebog, we brought our expert team to one of the UK’s most remote and most photographable locations — because if you’re willing to go to such tremendous lengths for an amazing photo, then so are we.”
How long the store will remain at this location in the middle of a national park isn’t clear, but WEX says that putting it together left the team with “memories to last a lifetime”.
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Stephan Jukic is a technology and photography journalist and experimental photographer who spends his time living in both Canada and Mexico. He loves cross-cultural street photo exploration and creating fine art photo compositions.
