Interview: Jonas Peterson

Working with Uncle Ken

Interview: Simon Whitten (UK)

February 22nd, 2010 in People by Ian Baugh

“I’m going to interview Simon Whitten while I’m in the UK,” I said to Heather, “Short story – what springs to mind?”

“Stately homes … panoramic images … simple, classic album designs,” she said.

Simon has established a solid business at the very top of the UK wedding market, and what struck me about our conversation was his confidence and clarity in talking about it.

To succeed in this business requires a lot more than photographic passion and skills. You need a clear understanding of your market position, your clientele and where they come from, your brand and how you project it.

The low end of the market is always there, and always has been, he says, but it’s irrelevant. His challenges come from mid-range competitors.

In our conversation he talks about all this, the history of his studio, how he responded to the recession last year, and why timeless design is so important.

He stresses the importance of his website, so be sure to check that out too.

You might also like to take a look at the albums from Simon that we’ve featured on our consumer blog.

Click here to listen to my interview with Simon. (51 mins)

As they say, success leaves clues…

Cheers, Ian

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February 15th, 2010 in People by Ian Baugh

Yesterday Nigel showed me this on Jayson Kingsbeer’s website:

“My packages are simple and easy to understand, and as an added bonus I will also offer a free engagement shoot even if you do not decide to book your wedding with us.”

Jayson is New Zealand’s youngest professional photographer, but I reckon he has something to teach us, starting with the terrific air of confidence he projects with that offer!

His packages are … cheap … but how do you tell a 15-year-old he’s underselling himself?

He has a Flickr feed.

He has 479 friends on Facebook (480 if he approves me).

He has 1279 followers on Twitter (including me).

He’s been on television.

Read this interview for much more (it’s OK, they got his parent’s permission).

I looked to see what he thought of Photojunction (“Makes designing wedding albums SOOOOOO much easier!”) and Queensberry (“Argh wish I could afford to use Queensberry!”).

If you’re not a photographer on New Zealand’s East Coast, please do us both a favour and spread the word.

Cheers, Ian

PS About Jayson’s no obligation engagement shoot, by happenstance I came across this from Seth (who else?) about the hidden power of a gift “freely and gladly accepted” to create imbalance, and motion, and to change everything.

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Working with Uncle Ken

Working with Uncle Ken

December 2nd, 2009 in People by Johannes van Kan

Every wedding photographer has an Uncle Ken story.

I was hanging out at a wedding with photographer Brett Prestidge when I first arrived in the UK and something amazing happened…

We met the ultimate Uncle Ken.

Uncle Ken informed us that he had the okay from the bride and groom to do a big group photograph for them.

It is so often the case that as professionals we arrive at weddings and somebody there has a bigger camera than us … this time it was Uncle Ken. Brett and I were using small, discrete Leica M9s and M8s.

So often Uncle Ken tries to take control. This Uncle Ken (his real name) earned the right.

Cheers
Johannes

Uncle Ken with his 8x10" Gandolfi

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Simply good

October 7th, 2009 in People by Johannes van Kan

Tags: Clients, Customer Service

On my trip to the UK I had the opportunity to visit the studio of Alan and Jackie Rankine. Their work is aimed at a high end market. Their sales are substantial. They don’t aim to be the latest newest thing. They do work to stay current but they have cleverly understood the needs of their clients.

Their formula is simple and effective. Know your clients, produce consistently good work, back up your promise to perform with the quality of your presentation (including coffee and cake), always have something bigger and better for the client to buy, and have your studio in a castle.

They don’t chase the latest trends, and in fact just strive to do what they do better each time. I enjoyed meeting them and hope they prosper in their next season.

Cheers, Johannes

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Working with Uncle Ken

Interview with: Suzanne Black

July 6th, 2009 in People by Nigel Hicks

Tags: Albums, Clients, Customer Experience, Interview, Suzanne Black

Four years in, and Suzanne Black could teach a lot of people a lot of things…especially about marketing and surviving when times get tough.

I had a chat with her about what she thinks are the keys to success, how she turns 90% of her enquiries into bookings and why albums are so important to her business.

Positivity is contagious.

Suzanne is feeling positive right now. I haven’t heard that response to a question about the state of the economy in a long time, but after chatting I’ve decided describing her as “positive” is an understatement…

She says, “In the current climate I think it’s more and more important to sell yourself to the client in a positive way. If your clients do a side-by-side comparison of packages and photographers, you’re never going to win. You’re just a number.”

Instead Suzanne believes in creating an individual identity. Focusing on building your business so people remember something about it, rather than just your price.

“It’s really important to keep a positive attitude because clients can really sense it,” Suzanne says.

“Personally I keep a really positive attitude, especially when speaking to clients and building on the relationships I already have with vendors, venues and previous clients. People can sense your attitude straight away and the last thing you want are potential clients sensing a negativity about you.”

Suzanne told me how clients tell her of other photographers they’ve seen, who never stopped talking about what everyone else was doing, or how bad the economy is right now.

“Avoid listening to all the doom and gloom out there and refuse to let negativity creep into your business.”

Good advice.

Picking and Choosing

Suzanne started off low in terms of pricing, with the intention of building a good solid foundation to grow her business from. Four years later, grown it has. She says she’s now at the middle to high end of the market in her area in terms of pricing, but it took hard work, planning and and a specific strategy to get there.

“When I first started out I sat down and worked out which part of the wedding industry I wanted to operate in. I didn’t think I could be, nor did I want to be, all things to all people. I identified who I wanted as my target brides, and marketed specifically to them.”

With the help of CPT, Suzanne has developed some great marketing skills and defined her business brand so much that she now books nearly every client who comes to see her. Her explanation? “Really knowing who my clients are and engaging with them before I meet them.”

The album’s role

Suzanne offers Queensberry albums in all of her packages. In fact, they’re key to what she offers, and she says the majority of her clients select additional images for their wedding album.

“While obviously the photography is important, I believe the final presentation of the images is equally important. Albums play a huge part in my business. A beautiful custom designed album is all part of the service that I provide.”

Not only does she exclusively use and love Queensberry’s albums, she’s a huge fan of our accessory range. In fact she says it’s very rare for her not to sell at least two digital copy albums from every wedding.

Suzanne also makes use of Queensberry’s print and assembly service as she works on her own. “It leaves me with more time to be out shooting or marketing my business,” she says.

Innovation

Digital Copies aren’t the only accessory album that Suzanne uses though. With a bit of creative thinking, Suzanne uses another product from our accessory range to get her photos in front of guests at weddings.

“I wanted a product that would show off my images at the actual wedding to all the guests. I decided that Queensberry’s Demi albums would be perfect to showcase a selected number of images the couple chose from their engagement shoot. I get those images made up into a Demi album that guests can sign at the wedding – and my images get exposure.”

Suzanne was the first client to come up with the idea and unsurprisingly, it’s caught on with plenty more clients since.

Last Words?

Tell us what you consider your top three keys to success?

“Know your clients. Recognise that an exisiting client is far easier to market to than a new one. And have a positive attitude – don’t listen to all the doom and gloom out there!”

Her final thoughts summed up her approach to business, and life, really well I thought…

“We’ve come through some recent years where work has been easy to find. I think it will have made quite a few people complacent. As I’ve said before attitude is key, and I look forward to the challenges the next few years bring.”

Cheers, Nigel

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Interview with: Jeff and Erin Youngren

June 17th, 2009 in People by Nigel Hicks

Tags: Albums, Authenticity, Clients, Interview, Marketing, Relationships, Social Media, The Youngrens

I just made a couple of new friends, Jeff and Erin Youngren from San Diego… And it took all of a couple of minutes.

Stephen and Danny first met these guys at WPPI in Vegas, and we’ve been in touch ever since. You may remember our post about their new website and promo video so I asked them to share some of their experiences around online marketing, business and their album strategy. But it was their philosophy, not only to business, but to life, that dominated the conversation.

Let’s be friends

Jeff and Erin had just returned from a holiday to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, with past clients of theirs when we spoke. That’s pretty normal they reckon.

“We are very much driven by relationships and we love the relationships we build with our clients. We could probably count on one hand the number of clients we’re not still in regular contact with.”

Jeff and Erin have built their entire business on referrals and photograph a maximum of 20 weddings each year, leaving them more time to invest in getting to know couples before their weddings. So what’s the benefit?

“We’re in this for the relationships … When couples initially come to meet us it’s almost like an interview for a friendship. We don’t just want a business arrangement, we want a relationship.

“We feel it’s also important that our clients know who we are, so they feel comfortable and relaxed, and open up in front of the camera.”

Jeff recalled several occasions where they’d already met their clients’ families and friends before the wedding, simply because they’d become such good friends and been involved in their wider lives.

“When the guests are expecting us or already know us, we’re seen as friends, not just photographers. That makes our job so much easier! It really allows us to be able to step back and photograph the moments as they unfold without our clients or their families even realizing we’re there. They trust us because of the relationship we’ve already built.”

Marketing

Head to Jeff and Erin’s new website and you’ll land on their promo video. The idea of the video was to tell their story as photographers, and people, to potential clients within minutes of first visiting their website. They charged videographer Anton Lorimer of Lorimerworks out of San Francisco, California with capturing their personalities, and ‘getting prospective clients to feel like they know us in less than three minutes’.

“We felt a video was the best way for couples to immediately and effectively get to know us as people and photographers. We wanted people to have a clear picture of who we are, and be drawn to us. It’s intriguing for potential clients to see us before they see our work. It encourages them to go deeper into our website and blog and learn more about us, and our art.”

Although working with Anton was a breeze, the website and branding was a different story. They’re over the moon with the result, but Jeff says if he had to do it all over again he’d travel a much straighter road. In other words?

“Hire an absolute pro and spend a bit more money.

“Things really came together when we found the designer that clicked with our vision. It definitely took a lot of work to get here, but it’s probably one of the most important things to get right. It is integral for our brand strategy for everything to have the same feel – from the website to our blog to our business cards to our logo. We wanted everything to be really consistent.”

Facebook

I knew their marketing efforts wouldn’t stop at a flashy new website and promo video, and they seemed like the Facebook type.

“Facebook is great because it allows us to feature our work and personalities in front of a large readership and to keep reminding people of the cool things we’re up to. Lots of people don’t read blogs, and probably don’t even know what RSS is, but they’re on Facebook six hours a day.”

Facebook really fits with Jeff and Erin’s branding. Interestingly, they interact only through their personal profiles, but for good reason.

“We don’t have a business page or profile on Facebook. Everything comes from our personal pages. For example, when we post a gallery of a recent wedding, it’s on our personal page. We’re very conscious of crossing the line between personal and commercial interactions. Having personal profiles allows us to be seen as photographers sharing their photography life and images, rather than marketing our business. People know when they’re being marketed to, and we really want to avoid giving that feeling.”

Being yourself

Erin says that the key to developing your online personality is to always be authentic.

“No matter what medium you choose to engage in, you have to be yourself. Your customers crave authenticity and can spot a fake in an instant. It’s more important than ever to do your best to find out what’s remarkable about you and your style, and then find a way to tell everybody in a real, authentic way.”

Jeff has some simple but good advice about finding yourself as a photographer and defining your shooting style.

“You’ve just got to go out there and shoot, shoot, shoot, in order to develop your photographic style. A friend of mine told me you need to shoot over 100,000 images to discover what that style is. If you haven’t broken a shutter on your camera, you haven’t found your style yet!”

Albums

As Queensberry newbies, Jeff and Erin are in the process of developing new album offerings that will become a major focus of their business.

“Albums are extremely central to the transition we’re going through right now. Previously we were offering the same types of albums we knew our competitors were also offering, but we’ve realized we can use the album to separate us from our competitors.

“We want to create albums that simply blow people away and we want them to feel expensive and valuable. Our quest for the perfect fit eventually led us to Queensberry.”

I like the analogy Jeff uses to explain the album options they’re planning to offer their clients.

“We look at Queensberry albums as the Mercedes Benz of the industry, and we want to treat our albums like cars in a showroom. When you go into a Benz dealer, there’s only a couple of models, but they’re the best you can get!

“They’re all fully loaded with the latest gadgets and everything in them is of the finest quality. We want our clients to only have a few options too, and for those options to be the best you can get. They need to feel like they’re getting something really valuable. We’ve spent a lot of time and energy developing our craft in taking photographs, and we want our albums to add to that value in a huge way.”

The Youngrens work hard to educate their clients about the quality of their photographic work and emphasize their unwavering commitment to providing them with the absolute best customer service possible. So we’re glad they felt Queensberry fit perfectly into their story.

How to be successful?

Here’s what Jeff and Erin left with me…their three tips to success:

Be Honest to Yourself. Figure out who you are and what makes you unique, and build your business from the start around that. Your brand is more that just your colours or logo or website. It’s much closer to the core of you than many people think.
Be Authentic. Once you’ve figured out who you are, resist the temptation to be something you’re not. Be confident in your uniqueness and market yourself around that.
Be Generous. Make your business about helping people and invest yourself into the growth of other photographers.

Cheers, Nigel

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Interview with: Bruce Gabites

June 3rd, 2009 in People by Nigel Hicks

To listen to our interview with Bruce Gabites click here (22 mins).

Tags: Albums, Awards, Bruce Gabites, Clients, Interview, Marketing, Photoshop, Podcast, Workflow

Late last year Ian and I caught up with award winning photographer Bruce Gabites at his new Auckland studio. He’d just won his eighth straight Kodak Gold award in the Wedding Album category, and we wanted to find out his secret…

We spent a morning talking with him about why he enters photography competitions and what makes him so successful, the affect winning awards has on his business, and albums – the part they play in his packages, and how he goes about selling them.

Cheers, Nigel

PS Bruce recently shared some good advice about dealing with complaining clients with us. Click here to read it.

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Interview with: Johannes van Kan

May 22nd, 2009 in People by Nigel Hicks

To listen to our interview with Johannes click here.

Tags: Album Design, Clients, Interview, Johannes van Kan, Marketing, Photoshop, Podcast, Workflow

Greg and Natalie by Johannes van Kan

Johannes has been posting on Queensberry Connects for several months now. It’s been great to have a regular photographer perspective, and personally we’ve found his insights and opinions inspiring.

We asked him to contribute to our interview series by sharing his thoughts on album design.

In the conversation, Ian asks him to expand on several posts he’s written about the benefits of getting to know your clients before the wedding, and his ”six secrets” to designing a great album…

He also questions Johannes about how he interacts with his clients, his workflow and the part Photoshop plays.

And here’s an album we featured recently on Queensberry Connects.

Cheers, Nigel

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Interview with: Darcie Siiteri

April 30th, 2009 in People by Nigel Hicks

Click here to view Chris and Darcie’s website and portfolio

Tags: Album Design, Clients, Customer Experience, Innovative Photography, Interviews, Marketing, Packages, Products, Sales, Vendors

Welcome to the second interview in our series featuring clients whose businesses are thriving despite the current economic climate. Click here to read the first interview with Christian Oth.

In the same year they had their first child, Chris and Darcie Siiteri started their Austin (Texas) photography business, Innovative Photography. Fifteen years later they’re still at it and doing better than ever.

I gave an initially nervous Darcie an early morning call to chat about how they approach their album sales, and what they do to ensure their clients have an amazing experience and to foster relationships with other vendors…

Making it good

Price wise, it’s fair to say they started low. Darcie says, “I thought that if we made a $200 profit on every wedding we’d be rich.” 98 weddings later they needed help.

They found a mentor who told them to do four things: raise your prices, simplify your sales, have a flat hourly rate and don’t overwhelm your clients.

So they did just that. They raised their prices and toned down their whole approach, which included clearing their studio walls of portraits to create a cleaner and simpler look. Now their biggest problem is keeping their Labrador from jumping all over their clients when they walk in the door. But changing their studio isn’t the only thing they’ve done to boost business.

Making the sale

Album sales currently make up half of Chris and Darcie’s turnover. In fact, they went from ‘new client’ to what we call a ‘Top Tier’ client virtually overnight. But it wasn’t until they made a major change that they started to see increased returns from their albums sales.

“After digital came along we stopped offering large proof books with 5×5 prints in them. Clients were seeing them as a good (free) alternative to an album, and they weren’t buying. So we started to give our clients proof books of thumbnail images instead. Our album sales instantly went up.”

Chris and Darcie now include an Album Product Credit in their packages, which the clients can spend on whatever they like (enlargements etc). I broached the up-selling issue and she told me, “We’re artists. People love our work and they buy it, we don’t have to push it. I want every product we make to be unique and artful”. So she’s not one to push her clients, or look for the big sale, but Darcie says her clients appreciate their honesty.

Client experience

“We’re always direct and honest with them and give them our opinion, but I’m more concerned with the experience and relationship I have with my clients than with squeezing as much money out of them as I can.”

That relationship starts right from the first time they meet. Darcie says rarely do any of her clients have to ring the doorbell. “When we know there’s a client coming I’ve got my eyes peeled for when they drive in. I always greet them at the door and welcome them into our studio – it’s just a little way of showing that we care and we’re excited to meet them.”

Clients, Vendors and us

By this stage I knew Darcie loved making sure her clients have the most wonderful experience when they come to her – relationships are important. Chris and Darcie have also been fostering relationships with vendors in town, who they say regularly send business their way.

“We are constantly emailing vendors new images and updating their albums – we focus on taking extremely good care of them. Almost everything we give them is free and it’s worth it’s weight in gold.”

From hotels and florists to the local judge, they say the relationship goes both ways. For example they’ve set up a deal with a florist who, in return for product shots, sends flowers to Chris and Darcie’s top clients.

“We work very hard at maintaining our relationships with local top hotels and wedding venues”. In fact they’ve had so many requests from vendors to do their corporate photography that Chris and Darcie have set up a Vendors Rate: vendors can get their work or personal photography done at a discounted price.

Other than past client referrals, vendors are now Chris and Darcie’s largest source of referrals.

Darcie says volunteer work is a great way to build and develop relationships. “We work closely with a charity for disabled children, offering our services for fundraising and promotional work.”

Queensberry

So how did Chris and Darcie end up using Queensberry as their album supplier? Well it was Darcie’s 2am urge to look for ’something different’. Sitting up late one night, surfing the net, she came across Queensberry and decided to check us out. She ordered a Queensberry album, unassembled, and put photos from a recent wedding in it to see how it would look. It wasn’t meant for the client, but the client somehow saw it and just had to have it.

Darcie says, “Queensberry beautifies our business. To see the beautiful albums they create for our clients keeps us grounded. They’re so elegant.”

When it comes to album design, Darcie gets Queensberry to do it. Why? “I’d rather not be designing albums when I know there’s someone else that can do it for me, and better than me.”

Parting words

“Have fun when you shoot, be really honest with your clients and always seek to do better,” was Darcie’s parting advice. Oh, and “Always give your clients the best products you can ever imagine.”

Cheers, Nigel

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