Criminal Records has a permanent Majestic booth in it now through our venue placement program, and of every room we have installed into this year, this is the one where the machine needed the least explaining.
Everyone already in that store has made the argument for us.
The store
Criminal Records opened in 1991 on Little Five Points, started by Eric Levin, who lived in the back of the first shop. Thirty five years later it sells vinyl, CDs, comics, films and band merch out of its Euclid Avenue space, and it has hosted in store sets from the Meat Puppets, the Raconteurs, Boris, Olivia Dean and the Indigo Girls.
And this is the part that matters most for what we do: Levin helped start Record Store Day in 2008. The global annual celebration of buying a physical record from an independent shop began, in part, in this store.
You can read the whole history off the walls in our photos without anyone telling you. A gold record in a frame. A Kate Bush promo poster for The Red Shoes. An Atlantic Records step and repeat from an in store. R. Land's orange anniversary artwork, painted for the thirty fifth, which they marked in August with a free block party and thirty bands across three stages.
Why a record store is the right room
Here is the argument we usually have to make, and did not have to make here.
A photo booth prints a physical object in an era when nobody needs one. That is the entire value and it is also the entire objection. Why print a photo when your phone holds forty thousand of them.
Now look at who is standing in Criminal Records. Somebody flipping through the Dance and Electronic bins holding an Aphex Twin record they could stream for free in three seconds. They are in that shop precisely because owning the object is different from having access to the file. It sounds different, it looks different on a shelf, and it took a trip to get it.
That is the same argument as a photo strip, in a different medium. A booth is not an amenity bolted onto a record store. It is the shop's own thesis, expressed in two prints instead of twelve inches of vinyl. A store whose co-founder helped invent a holiday about buying physical media is not a place where we have to justify a machine that hands you something to keep.
What we built
The design brief here was the opposite of most retail work, because a record store is already the loudest visual environment we install into.
Look at what is on the walls in these photos: a chartreuse painted brick wall, exposed red brick, an orange mural, a gold record, concert posters, hand lettered section dividers, yellow milk crates, and several thousand album covers, every one of which was designed by somebody trying to grab your eye. That is not a room with a colour scheme. It is a room with an argument going on in it.
Put a colourful booth in there and it disappears into the noise. So we went the other way.
The custom panels are matte black with a brushed silver frame. The Criminal Records circular logo sits in white on the side, their own mark at full size, and the front panel reads PHOTOS vertically in white with the only instruction anyone needs underneath: 3 POSES, 2 PRINTS. Nothing else.
Then one colour in the whole machine. The curtain is bright red, and inside there is a black and white checkerboard floor. That is it. Black, white, silver, and a single red.
The result is that the booth becomes the only object in the room that is not competing. In a space full of things shouting, the quiet thing is what your eye lands on. Same logic we used for a watch boutique in Chicago, opposite reason: there we were being deferential to a calm room, here we are being the calm thing in a busy one.
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Underneath, it is our Classic booth, on leveling feet, with the print slot set into the lower front panel and a tap to pay reader beside the screen. Nobody at a record store is carrying cash.
Browsing time is booth time
A record store has an unusual rhythm compared with most of our installs, and it works in the booth's favour.
Buying a record is slow. You flip, you pull something out, you read the back, you put it back, you find something you were not looking for. People are in there for a while, often in twos and threes, often deliberately killing an afternoon. That is close to ideal for a booth: nobody is rushing past on the way somewhere, and there is always a natural moment to say let's do the thing on the way out.
It also means the booth gets used on ordinary Tuesdays rather than only on big days. Record Store Day and in store nights will spike it, but the steady business is regular customers who came in for one record and left with a strip.
Our booth at Indy CD & Vinyl in Indianapolis taught us most of this. Criminal Records is that lesson in a bigger, older, louder shop.
Georgia and beyond
This is our second Georgia install, alongside Wild Heaven Beer, and it gives us a proper presence in Atlanta for both rentals and long term placements.
Little Five Points is exactly the kind of neighbourhood our booths belong in: independent shops, real character, and people who go there on purpose rather than passing through.
Want one in your shop?
We design and build custom vintage photo booths and install them permanently through our permanent installation program, maintained by us so nobody behind your counter has to think about it.
If you run a record store, a bookshop, a bar or anywhere people already come to spend time on purpose, tell us about the room.
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