VANBAR the first 35 years

Established in 1980, Vanbar has grown to be Australia's leading Importer, Distributor, Manufacturer and Retailer of professional photographic supplies.

Vanbar started from a one room store in Carlton with a dwelling upstairs. This has grown over the past three decades to now encompass two showrooms in Fitzroy and Camperdown in NSW and a distribution warehouse and container delivery store in Fairfield. The business started with the importing of Audio Visual and photographic electronics in the early 80s and quickly grew with agencies such as LEE and Permajet. Over the years we have added many fine international brands and helped to establish many of these as world market leaders.

Through the 80s and 90s we became well established as one of Australia's main distributors of Photographic and imaging products to Professional Photographers, schools and government.  The digital era created new challenges and new opportunities and we quickly moved into new product lines through some resourceful acquisitions and also through the demise of some of our competitors. We have always felt that the best business model is to always focus and concentrate on our main strengths. For us that is Imaging, through photography. This has always helped us from diverging from our core and keeping us strong in our field. We always employee our staff based on the knowledge and interest in imaging topics and their passion for photography. This has always given us the edge as our staff are always free to give their own personal opinions and experience when asked for advice. Honesty and transparency in everything we do has help us grow to where we are today.

Several years ago, and as a consequence of what we were hearing from our customers we implemented our 1 hour customer response policy. This policy is very simple ands it states that we will make all our best efforts to respond to any customer complaint with one working hour. The response may simply be that we are awaiting a response from our supplier or that the repair or replacement is on its way. The response we hope will always be positive however it may not but we will move quickly towards resolving the issue with a response. The rapid response is paramount to our policy and our customers have come to expect this from us.

Vanbar employees over 30 staff around Australia, and we pride ourselves on being an equal opportunity employer. Over the years we have had employees of both sexes, numerous ethnic persuasions and all ages filling almost every position within the company; it is our strict policy to always employ the best person for every position. As we move into our 4th decade of business we accept and understand the new challenges put before us. Retailing has undergone unprecedented changes over the past few years and Vanbar has always maintained it is critical to develop new strategies to deal with these changes while continuing to maintain a high level of service and integrity for our customers.