UCN
Used Car News
11/8/2021
Marvelous ‘Spider’ Camera Saves Time By Jeffrey Bellant
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Automotive consultants will tell used-car sellers they can never have enough photos. More photos and more angles are better, they say. Apparently, Black Widow Imaging took that advice to heart with an automated device that takes photos to a new level. A vehicle parks in a space with a spider-like device hung above, with cameras on the sides around the vehicle, covering all angles. Jason Hauk, CEO and founder of Black Widow Imaging, said in recent years mobile phones had become the typical tool for shooting vehicle photos. He said critics thought Black Widow’s approach was all a bit too much. But Black Widow launched in 2019 at the National Automobile Dealers Association Convention & Expo in San Francisco, and timing is everything. “Us building an automated device seemed a little excessive and against the grain of what everyone else was doing,” he said. “Everybody said, ‘Why in the heck do you need all that?’ “Then COVID hit, and it was like, ‘We’ve got to get a lot of volume done, where’s that Black Widow thing.” Hauk got his start in reconditioning vehicles for dealers out of St. Louis. “I’m a fixer by trade and I was the recon guy,” he said. “So, I kept trying to ease the headaches of the dealers.” Recon led to pinstripes to window tinting, to transportation to auc-
tions and then to photography. “Everywhere I went, I knew the finish line was the photos,” he said. “No matter how hard we worked, no matter how many trucks or people we had, no matter how much PDR we had, you were the outcast until
those photos were online. Nothing counted until that was done.” To make it more streamlined, they invented studios, turntables and beautiful $200,000 set-ups. “Nobody had any room for them,” Hauk said. “You also needed an experienced person to use them and if that person was sick, then no photos were being taken.” So, people focused on mobile phones, but since people are different heights, there were too many variants and no consistency, he said. Hauk started selling studios, but it
wasn’t a scalable solution. “We weren’t afraid to fail,” he said. So, the company focused on learning more and adapting to what could work. The answer for Hauk’s company was the Black Widow and it came to him while he was in bed, unable to sleep. Hauk said he looked up and saw the ceiling fan, which was off. “I thought everybody ’s got a service
drive or a garage door,” he said. “I thought, ‘I’ll just hang it from the ceiling.’” The company built the first version and went to market in 2019. “What it does is tie everything together and make everything go faster,” he said. It may not be the most perfect, elegant solution, but Hauk said it offers one of the most critical components in a fast-paced industry: consistency. “A trusted standard,” he said. Also, he wanted something that could be used by anyone, from the office manager to the porter. It isn’t a condition report, but the Continued on page 5
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