Scottsdale company teams with UPS to preserve cherished images

A local audio-video processor for consumers is piloting a program with The UPS Store that could have the shipping giant selling the Scottsdale company’s services nationwide.

Audio Video Editor, based in Scottsdale with additional stores in Mesa, Chandler and Surprise, provides various audio and video services.

But the shop’s primary product is conversion of old, out-of-date visual formats such as 35mm slides, 8mm home movies, VHS, Betamax and the like into DVDs for preservation of cherished images, said company president Ron Stilwell.

The local company signed a national contract with The UPS Store that lets customers bring their image collections in any combination of formats to a UPS Store, which will pack it up and ship it free to Scottsdale for DVD replication. Audio Video editor will process the package and mail it back, Stilwell said.

The program was just launched in Minneapolis-St Paul, Stilwell said, and will be in a couple of additional markets — Austin, Texas, and Salt Lake City — before year-end.

Promotional posters went up in the Twin Cities stores less than two weeks ago, so it’s too soon to say whether it will be a hit, he said.

But early signs are good. The company has received 190 calls on its toll-free line about its services, and Minnesota store managers have said a lot of people have picked up brochures, Stilwell said.

“The posters just give people the idea, then they have to go home and collect the stuff,” Stilwell said.

That’s how the 15-month-old shop ramped up too, he said. In the beginning, people asked a lot of questions, and then they returned later with armfuls of films or photos and placed orders, Stilwell said.

“By the holidays last year, we were working 24-hour days,” he said.

A franchising expert, Stilwell took on operating partners for the three other shops. Eventually, he hopes to franchise the brand.

“That’s what I do,” he said.

But it was his wife, Brenda, the creative leader of the business, who brainstormed the concept.

The couple opened the shop at 10812 N. Scottsdale Road after Brenda Stilwell couldn’t find a place to transfer her father’s retirement party camcorder film onto a DVD and produce a handful of copies for other relatives.

The places that performed such services mostly worked for businesses and dealt in lots of 100 copies or more, she said. If they grudgingly agreed to take on her business, they put it at the bottom of a pile of more lucrative contracts and offered completion dates months, not weeks, away, she said.

“Companies weren’t interested in my one little tape,” she said. “I saw a niche, a real need.”

While Audio Video Editor has attracted several small businesses as customers, and even resorts have recommended the business to meeting planners, the needs of individual consumers are and will continue to be the shop’s focus, Brenda Stilwell said.

The contract with UPS came after Ron Stilwell and The UPS Store president were both enlisted as speakers at an International Franchise Association session and forged the deal over dinner, he said.