Bowens into liquidation?

A real shame if a British icon like Bowens disappears. I've bought a lot of their gear over the years... customer service has never been great but I've usually been happy with the products.
 
Sad news - used their 3 head lighting kit in the studio for many years
 
Very sad, first studio heads I bought 40-odd years ago - Bowens Monolight 400, pretty revolutionary in its day. Cost £200 as I recall, which is a few grand in today's money. They made some great kit.

I've not seen an official announcement from Bowens yet though. Is this the end, or is there something worth taking over? The brand name alone still has international resonance.
 
Used to have a couple of Bowens heads at work. They were pretty decent units. Shame when companies like this find themselves unable to compete in a market that they once led.
 
I remember when they were a camera repair business just off st John near farringdon in the late 50's .
They repaired my weston meter for me. Later I bought their state of art twelve gun set of flash bulb units that I could daisy chain for industrial shots. You could test the links and bulbs from the controll unit before you shot. They also sold the 100 w sized flah bulbs PF100/97 in outer cases of 144.
They also made a flash reflector that held and fired up to twelve bulbs at once. They demonstrated one to me but it scared me near to death.

Businesses come and go......it is just the natural way of life.
 
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Sad news indeed, still using 5 Gemini heads in the studio, might have to buy a couple of spare tubes..
 
GeeJay57 said:
Used to have a couple of Bowens heads at work. They were pretty decent units. Shame when companies like this find themselves unable to compete in a market that they once led.
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Not saying this is the case but its usually when they are ahead that they rest on their laurels and the others leave them a long way back.
 
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Don't know if it's official yet, but a friend of mine is one of their suppliers and he was contacted by the bowens management today to say they have gone into liquidation.

They owe him quite a bit, so he's not a happy chap.
 
jamesev said:
Not saying this is the case but its usually when they are ahead that they rest on their laurels and the others leave them a long way back.
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I think this is the case James. I remember when I was buying my second round of studio lights (I had some cheap Coreflash units from Viewfinder - which still work today, but are er.. a bit "vague" and very slow). A friend of mine had a Bowens kit and I played around with it, but they were also quite slow (ie the flash duration and recycle were too long for my purposes). They also looked like they were out of the ark - with those odd adjustment knobs (one for whole stops and one for tenths). They were well built for sure, but expensive, and devoid of any of the new featires that were starting to appear on other manufacturers' lights such as TTL (not much use in the studio I grant you) flast flash duration and high speed sync for freezing action with shutter speed and an ambient/flash mix. Early on Bowens seems to have had a real flair for innovation, producing the world's first mono-block lights (ie all in one block - no separate head) in 1963. I talked to their ex-technical director Peter Louden at the photography show at the time I was shopping for new lights and he hinted that innovation being strangled by a conservative board was a key reason for his departure from Bowens in 2008. Since then they have shifted manufacture to China and downsized the UK workforce considerably. In later years directors have come and gone faster than Barry Guiler gets up a chimney, and in 2016 the writing was on the wall when they abandoned their stand at the Photography Show (which must have already cost thousands). I did a bit of digging at the time and the one remaining director John Gobbi had only been there a year, and a new director, Christiane Brock had arrived. She is a German fund manager - which indicated either a rescue package, or damage limitation from an existing investment partner. The current crop are also German and although they are not that visible online, I suspect they work for Robus Credit. I was quite surpised to see them launch a new range of lights, however at the Photo Show this year, their stand had mostly the old stuff on it, with only a handful of the new units.

Bowens net worth has declined from over £10m in 2011 to £2.4m in 2015. They have outstanding debts with RBS, Shawbrook and "Robus German Credit Special Situations Master Fund" - the name of which may be significant. Bowens (and Calumet, Fixation and WEX) are owned by the investment company, Aurelius. I hope they can find some technical leadership and start innovating again - the new XMT battery powered HSS lights look pretty good, however others have had lights like this for a while now. The XMS studio lights are just normal studio mono-blocks as far as I can tell - just brought up to date (ie in line with everyone else's). Reasonably fast but bloomin' heavy at 3.7kg

I bought 3 Lencarta SF600's in the end btw after seeing a demo on their stand - I've had them 4 years now and they've worked out very well for me. Peter Louden now owns another lighting company: MagneFlash http://www.magneflash.com/ It should be apparent from their website where Peter's skills lie.... :p
 
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Scooter said:
The XMS studio lights are just normal studio mono-blocks as far as I can tell - just brought up to date (ie in line with everyone else's).
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I had an XMS briefly... the new 'quick lock adjustment latch' was easy enough to operate but with a heavy modifier attached (Bowens own modifiers by the way... not a third party) it wasn't anywhere near tight enough to stop the unit from drooping under the weight. There didn't seem to be any way of adjusting the tension and a plea for help to 'customer support' was ignored... I guess they hadn't thought of trying to fit heavy modifiers to the unit when they designed it! Pants really... I sold it shortly afterwards.
 
Scooter said:
I think this is the case James. I remember when I was buying my second round of studio lights (I had some cheap Coreflash units from Viewfinder - which still work today, but are er.. a bit "vague" and very slow). A friend of mine had a Bowens kit and I played around with it, but they were also quite slow (ie the flash duration and recycle were too long for my purposes). They also looked like they were out of the ark - with those odd adjustment knobs (one for whole stops and one for tenths). They were well built for sure, but expensive, and devoid of any of the new featires that were starting to appear on other manufacturers' lights such as TTL (not much use in the studio I grant you) flast flash duration and high speed sync for freezing action with shutter speed and an ambient/flash mix. Early on Bowens seems to have had a real flair for innovation, producing the world's first mono-block lights (ie all in one block - no separate head) in 1963. I talked to their ex-technical director Peter Louden at the photography show at the time I was shopping for new lights and he hinted that innovation being strangled by a conservative board was a key reason for his departure from Bowens in 2008. Since then they have shifted manufacture to China and downsized the UK workforce considerably. In later years directors have come and gone faster than Barry Guiler gets up a chimney, and in 2016 the writing was on the wall when they abandoned their stand at the Photography Show (which must have already cost thousands). I did a bit of digging at the time and the one remaining director John Gobbi had only been there a year, and a new director, Christiane Brock had arrived. She is a German fund manager - which indicated either a rescue package, or damage limitation from an existing investment partner. The current crop are also German and although they are not that visible online, I suspect they work for Robus Credit. I was quite surpised to see them launch a new range of lights, however at the Photo Show this year, their stand had mostly the old stuff on it, with only a handful of the new units.

Bowens net worth has declined from over £10m in 2011 to £2.4m in 2015. They have outstanding debts with RBS, Shawbrook and "Robus German Credit Special Situations Master Fund" - the name of which may be significant. Bowens (and Calumet, Fixation and WEX) are owned by the investment company, Aurelius. I hope they can find some technical leadership and start innovating again - the new XMT battery powered HSS lights look pretty good, however others have had lights like this for a while now. The XMS studio lights are just normal studio mono-blocks as far as I can tell - just brought up to date (ie in line with everyone else's). Reasonably fast but bloomin' heavy at 3.7kg

I bought 3 Lencarta SF600's in the end btw after seeing a demo on their stand - I've had them 4 years now and they've worked out very well for me. Peter Louden now owns another lighting company: MagneFlash http://www.magneflash.com/ It should be apparent from their website where Peter's skills lie.... :p
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Interesting Owen, cheers. I agree with everything up to the last paragraph. Those MagnaFlash things are really poor. I was sent one to test for a magazine review but it was so bad I refused and sent it back.
 
Oh I don't disagree with you on the Splash lights - they are more than a bit Blue Peter. I think Peter Louden is a great innovator but design and manufacturing are about the same as web site design in his profile. The MagneFlash lights are essentially 3 flashes sharing a common battery. This gives a constant colour and duration, but only a 1.5 stop range in intensity. They also look like a school science project, and despite being a small flash, require a small briefcase to transport...
 
Scooter said:
Oh I don't disagree with you on the Splash lights - they are more than a bit Blue Peter. I think Peter Louden is a great innovator but design and manufacturing are about the same as web site design in his profile. The MagneFlash lights are essentially 3 flashes sharing a common battery. This gives a constant colour and duration, but only a 1.5 stop range in intensity. They also look like a school science project, and despite being a small flash, require a small briefcase to transport...
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Haha yes - Blue Peter! The units I tried even featured some hose pipe fittings... seriously, as in garden hose. Not to mention feeble power and a recycle time measured in tens of seconds.

Back on topic, it seems to me that the future of high-end flash is now IGBT led - it just ticks so many more boxes. The new area with growth potential is IGBT location flash, with big battery power, auto-TTL, HSS, fast durations and full radio remote control, but as one senior industry figure told me recently, "the Chinese own IGBT." They also own low cost production. The game has changed, and some Chinese manufacturers have set the bar pretty high with great specs and performance, good build quality and affordable prices. Bowens aside, it's not looking rosy for the other big European brands either :(
 
Bowens brought out the very first monoblock lights, which put them on the map and gave them a tremendous advantage.
But their lights were never anything special... Once they got past their early models, which were very basic, they improved the quality, introduced the brilliant S-fit mount and gained a good reputation for quality - but not for innovation. Back in the day, with very little other competition around, they had the reputation for build quality and Elinchrom had the reputation for innovation. Over time, Elinchrom went forwards and Bowens when backwards.

But they rested on their laurels and didn't keep up with improvements to technology. Even when they finally got round to introducing radio triggering, they used their old Pulsar technology and charged a silly price for it, and the quality suffered greatly when they moved their production to China. There are advantages to manufacturing in China, but the smart money sets up factories in Shenzen, the high tech centre where all of the innovation happens and where there is a massive pool of skilled specialist labour and specialist suppliers, but for some reason Bowens went to Suzhou, near Shanghai....

They remind me strongly of Rover Cars, another old firm with a reputation for good quality if unexciting products. When Rover changed hands (as Bowens has done several times) they spent a fortune on marketing but didn't spend money developing new cars. Bowens didn't invest in new technology, and all of their 'new' products were just re-vamps of their existing, dated models. I don't include their latest models in this statement, but then these models weren't actually made by them anyway.

For many years, they have been trying to sell old fashioned, over priced products to an increasingly tech and cost-consious market, and possibly relying on legacy sales to the military and to educational establishments - a market that both Elinchrom and Lencarta are now very successful in. Last year, when I was still with Lencarta, we were asked to quote a college for a range of flash equipment and from memory our quote came to about £11,000 and included much better, IGBT flashes, but the customer decided to spend well over twice as much on old technology Bowens instead, simply because they had always bought Bowens - but customers as stupid as these are a dying breed:)
 
Garry Edwards said:
Even when they finally got round to introducing radio triggering, they used their old Pulsar technology and charged a silly price for it, and the quality suffered greatly when they moved their production to China.
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I think it's even worse than that, if you go back to the Digital DX heads they had wireless control of the head via IR, you could adjust everything and that head is what 20-30 years old? How did they have the sense to implement such a thing then but not properly carry that through to their newer heads?

They did offer the modular radio system in their R/Pro and Classic heads, I can't recall if it offered power adjustment but that you could choose between integrated Pulsar or PocketWizard seemed a reasonably impressive feat but as you say it was silly money, the PocketWizard cards retailed at something stupid like £120 (assuming you could find them) and they didn't offer this feature on their lower end 200/400 heads. They did eventually integrate it with the 200Rx/400Rx heads but you could see how badly thought out it was, the 200Rx got discontinued not long after introduction (I'd be willing to bet it was down to p*** poor sales as they were massively expensive heads at only 200 Ws) and it looked like they couldn't be bothered to properly design it into the head as the radio portion looked like a lump dumped on the top.

I was quite surprised when I realised that their new Generation X heads were only a replacement for their R/Pro heads and the lower end was going to continue to be the Gemini 400, so the cheapest offerings across the range is 400Rx at £300, the XMS 500 at £700 and the XMT 500 at £1070. Not quite seeing how this was supposed to solve their problems.
 
Sad, but thats life.

How easy will it be to get replace bulbs?
Are they universal or will it pay to stock up?
 
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