About us

Queensberry began out of a desire to design and make beautiful things. In 1969, in Auckland New Zealand, with no money but plenty of enthusiasm, a young Heather Baugh decided that she'd like to make her mother a leather handbag.

Coming from a family of artists and designers, creativity was in her DNA, and she soon discovered an affinity for leather that led her to start her own handcraft leather business. 

Meet the rest of family

Heather made albums from the start, and as the family business continued to grow Queensberry's partnership with photographers created a strong foundation. Today, every product and service under the Queensberry brand must stand up to the test of making life for the professional photographer simpler, more profitable and more fun, from beautiful products and presentation, to online hosting and e-commerce.

At the same time we — the Baugh family and our staff — never forget Heather's insight that we, with our photographer partners, are here to serve those "strangers in the viewfinder" by crafting their memories into treasured possessions that tell their unique stories.

Milestones — 1969 to 2019

Ian | Director

Ian graduated with an arts degree so long ago he prefers not to remember. After teaching history for a few years he got involved in small boat design and construction, which led him to a foreign aid project building pole-and-line tuna fishing boats in the Solomon Islands. Strangely enough it was there that someone asked if he’d heard of a little company called “Apple" making “computers”, which became a key part of the growing business when he joined Heather in the early 80s. His first purchases were an Apple IIe and a Morrow, which he loved because when it crashed he could go into the data and re-balance the books manually. That was followed by a "luggable" Mac SE, which he used whenever he could get it off Stephen. These days he focuses on marketing and finance, happy to leave software development and herding cats to Stephen.

Stephen | CEO and Managing Director

From his high school days Stephen has loved business and computers. After university he worked briefly in Queensberry, where his biggest achievement was a corporate sale that still figures in company legend. Stephen spent seven years in corporate sales with Fuji Xerox in Brisbane, where he developed a pioneering CRM package to help him manage a large, widespread territory. He returned to Queensberry in 1996, after marrying Sonya and persuading her to leave Brisbane's sun for Auckland's occasional showers. Sonya worked in the business for several years running our sales and support team. They have two daughters, Alexandria and Charlotte. With over 30 years IT experience Stephen is the driving force behind all our IT systems and software, all of which have been developed in-house. To keep up with his sister, Adrienne, Stephen is still trying to teach his cats to wave.

Adrienne | Director and Bindery Manager

Adrienne's first role in Queensberry was making gold edge pin hinge pages while in junior high to pay her own way to Australia for a holiday, and she has never let her parents forget it. She graduated from Auckland University with a B.Sc. in Zoology and for a few years pursued her love of animals by working with one of New Zealand's foremost animal trainers. She still wrangles animals for the occasional film shoot, and her dogs are famous in her neighbourhood for their geniality and good manners. In Queensberry Adrienne has worked throughout the finance, production and HR teams. She has a passion for team building and personal development, practises part time as a life coach, and honestly doesn't mind taking direction from her brother.

Alexandria | Design and Marketing Coordinator

Alex represents the third generation of the Baugh family in Queensberry, proof that the apple does not fall far from the tree. Like her Dad she first demonstrated her talent at school, although her interests are more towards the graphic arts, web design and HTML coding. The family also admire her very elegant handwriting. Alex has proved her independence and resourcefulness by travelling extensively in South East Asia, Southern Africa and India, starting right out of school and often travelling alone. At Queensberry, she coordinates our marketing, design and software development. She's quiet and determined by nature, but also learning that one of the essential life skills is keeping the rest of her family in line.

Milestones

1969 — Beginnings: Queensberry begins life as Heather Baugh's leather crafts business. Heather soon engages with photographers looking for handcrafted albums. Her husband Ian joins the growing family business in the 1980s, and they’re soon shipping albums to Australia, our first export market.

1994 — Every Album Made to Order: Heather and Ian transform the album business by resolving that in future they’ll make every album to order, instead of assembling clunky off-the-shelf components. They promise to “liberate photographers from the restraints and tired designs of album makers forever!”

1996 — A New Generation: Stephen and Adrienne become involved and by the turn of the century we're reaching out to photographer clients in North America and Europe, where our custom-made albums prove to be revolutionary.

2001 — Photojunction: First release of our pioneering, free-form album design software, allowing photographers everywhere to design albums and upload orders and image files direct to Queensberry.

2003 — In-house Printing: Buying New Zealand’s iconic Chromatek Pro Lab brings us access to decades of printing experience, and means we can offer our clients highly customised albums, fully printed and bound, ready for "the people in the viewfinder".

2010 — Digital Printing: We enter the world of digital offset printing, and launch Queensberry Photo Books, a new standard in art books, as well as new offset print options in our albums. Inkjet printing follows soon after.

2012 — Workspace: We release the first iteration of our online gallery platform. Our goal is to enable photographers to manage their entire online business on a single integrated platform — image hosting, retail shopping cart, album design, album proofing, website hosting and blogging. We also introduced album design and colour correction as an optional free service to help make life easier for our clients.

2012 — Beyond books and albums: We harness Workspace and our printing expertise to reach out to the world of portrait photography — families, newborns, pets, boudoir and all the rest — with a dramatically diversified product range including boxes, frames and canvases, as well as prints for everything from high-end custom framing to high-volume group photography.

2019 — 50 years of Queensberry!

2020 — Introducing Print Shop
In the midst of a global pandemic we launched our new platform, Print Shop. Print Shop allows photographers and artists to build ecommerce stores to sell their art and photography online. 

From Revolution to Evolution: After decades of intense change the last few years have been a period of constant refinement — tweaking our websites, systems and products to suit the changing needs of our customers and the market we operate in. Who knows? The next revolution may be just around the corner!