In an era where everyone can shoot, imaging content has become increasingly diverse: from outdoor adventures to urban vlogs, from live streaming sales to wildlife photography, and from daily home recordings to aerospace shooting, each creative scene may present different personalized demands for equipment and accessories.
The trend of scene segmentation has led to market growth. Data shows that China’s imaging accessories market has a scale of 60 billion yuan, and this scale is growing at a double-digit rate annually. This growth driven by segmentation is influencing the product logic in the imaging industry, gradually becoming a decision anchor for equipment manufacturers to seize the market.
At the 2025 Shenzhen International Imaging Culture Week’s “Global Imaging Scene Industry Forum”, Zhou Yang, founder and CEO of the imaging equipment brand SmallRig, emphasized that the industry is entering an era of transformation from “tool providers” to “scene service providers”. SmallRig aims to build an ecosystem starting from user co-creation to achieve industrial collaboration and construct a complete “scene closed loop”.
User Co-Creation: From Individual Needs to Standardized Products
Pang Zhiqiang, CTO of SmallRig, believes that if segmented, there could be thousands of creative scenes faced by imaging creators worldwide, and the “Top Ten Imaging Scenes” released during SmallRig’s 10th anniversary in 2024 now seems limited.
Traditional R&D methods struggle to cover such diverse needs. Therefore, SmallRig has introduced two key mechanisms: Co-Design and DreamRig.
DreamRig is a highly representative scene customization mechanism: when users propose unique needs (such as needing to mount equipment in a tree to shoot a bird’s nest), SmallRig not only customizes samples for them and provides them for free but also puts the product into the community for consensus validation.
Once the market demand is validated, such customized products may be converted into commercial SKUs, and the users who proposed the ideas can also participate in revenue sharing.
This approach not only activates the inspiration source of the “scene origin” but also allows users to truly integrate into the product chain, becoming co-creators rather than passive consumers.
Ecological System: Modular Products Solve the “One-Stop Shooting Dilemma”
The imaging auxiliary equipment industry has long been characterized by “each doing their own thing”—lighting manufacturers do not handle audio, microphone brands do not manage power supply, and users often have to assemble personalized complete solutions across brands, which often leads to inconsistent standards and poor compatibility.
Pang Zhiqiang introduced that SmallRig’s approach is to horizontally “gather together” and vertically “take root”: horizontally connecting modules from brackets, cages, lighting, power supply to audio, creating a unified ecosystem; vertically focusing on technology integration to achieve standard collaboration and product interoperability.
For example, for mobile live streaming and vlog creation scenes, SmallRig’s “All in One” kit covers the entire chain of needs including mobile handheld, expansion, power supply, heat dissipation, lighting, and microphones, allowing users to assemble as needed like building with Legos, enabling a lightweight setup for one person with one machine.
Scene Closed Loop: From Demand Co-Creation to Industrial Collaboration
Zhou Yang, founder and CEO of SmallRig, revealed that SmallRig currently serves users in 160 countries worldwide, covering mature markets in Europe and America, as well as emerging markets in Southeast Asia, with over 700 product SKUs and maintaining a pace of “1.6 new products daily”. Behind this is a closed-loop mechanism from user demand collection, rapid sample prototyping, to product standardization and global distribution.
To further expand the depth and breadth of scene research, SmallRig has also partnered with companies like Sony, Lexar, and Haohan to jointly launch the 2025 Global Imaging Scene Research and Promotion Plan, exploring new trends such as AI imaging and sustainable accessories, providing more universal toolchains for the industry.
The imaging industry is transitioning from device-driven to “scene-driven”. Manufacturers like SmallRig are redefining the value boundaries of imaging equipment through user co-creation and ecosystem integration—not just selling a bracket or a light, but providing systems to help users solve their “how to shoot” problems.