Lessons

Lesson Info

Day 16 Bonus: "Product Line"

I really want to make sure that I'm showing our images either framed or campus gallery raps I want to show everything finished and ready to hang on the wall I love wild sorbet frames and you guys are going to see those and here we talk about wells or sorbet frames quite a few times during this program but I you know, with your clients I have got wild survey hanging all over my studio and of course we're building for our clients in preview and showing them if that's the right frame for them we use a handcrafted framing for our traditional frames and, you know, that's appropriate for a lot of our clients as well. But when wild turbay is appropriate, you know, I hear people sometimes that say, you know that hand painted framing that's just not for me or for my clients my clients are more traditional, but you can do something as simple is this that's just a grey and a black that's going to go into a very traditional home just beautifully and still give them that really unique frame that's ...

different from anything that they're going to get anywhere else? And I have gotten a lot of clients over the years just by someone walking into somebody's home and saying, oh my gosh, where did you get those frames aren't even talking about my pictures they're talking about the frames and so you know these air great to be ableto having your client's homes and there really are a great tool for you to use and wild survey has tools for you but to use with your clients as well and super amazing catalogues this is I don't even know if this is the most current one but all through their catalogue I'll just flip through it but they've got just amazing groupings and rooms just showing thing's finished so that your client can get a ton of ideas there's no pricing and here and there's no pricing on their website you've got to be a whole cell account member to be able to get their pricing and so this is just a great told even use with your client so just have him put through and get ideas and um you know, use use these things I sold while saray frames before I ever had frame hanging in my studio just because of this the catalogs and get their back catalogs if they've got some left because they're all just a really really great little publication for you and I will give you ideas to as your building frame groupings for your clients in preview you're going to get some great ideas from the wild sorbet catalog yourself one of the things that I love besides wall portrait's is albums and we sell a lot of albums to our clients who want to make that available to our clients when I started selling albums, I realize that, you know, there's all these different options there's a million cover choices and number of pages that you could put in there is rounded corners or square corners there's, you know, multiple piece binding like like this album and I'll pick this up so you can see it a little bit better. This is a hefty album, this is an album that we did for a baby client who we photographed every month of the first year, and this is a c I z select album, and so with this you can choose the front, the spine and the back cover's individually, and we love these, but when I first started offering these albums, I didn't know how to show them to my clients. I don't know how to show all the options, and I literally had a spreadsheet of, you know, this many pages with this many images and this kind of cover and, you know, just all the different options is going to equal this much money, and no one was buying albums because it was just too much to think about. And so I quickly changed that I had that spreadsheet available for about a week, and people were just too confused and it was just a no if they're confused, they can't say yes because I just don't understand and so I immediately stepped back to figure out how I could sell albums more efficiently and make sure that people were excited about buying them and so now buying an album with me is pretty much a yes or a no do you want an allen d and I want an album and most of our clients love getting allies because it does tell the story of their entire session and so to make that very easy for them, I have priced my albums at the top and of the pricing structure so that I know no matter how many images I end up putting in the album how many pages that ends up being I am covered for that cost if I end up with less pages or less images, then it's totally fine to make a little more money so that works out great and with the albums the way I designed them, they're all custom designed they're all a little bit different I do have templates for some of the albums that we dio for instance are really kids albums, which are these you can see that they're they're the same, the covers are the same. It is a template as you go through some of the pages might be, you know, we might have this layout on a different page as we move through, you know, I might switch them around and order, but the actual lay out of the pages don't don't change it's a template but our custom alums that we do for our family portrait sessions as well as our first your client's those air all custom designed and the way I designed them with the client is I just go through and as we're going to the sale, I'm having the client categorized their images and yes nose and maybes and so when we're done and they've chosen yes, we do want an album I don't want to sit there with them and go, you know well, you've got thirty images you you've gotta narrow it down to that's how many images are going in the album or forty or fifty or whatever? I just want to let them know as I designed your album, I'm gonna work thru your favorite images your yes images to be the main images in your album the maybes will be used where I need them to finish the story and the nose won't be included. Is that okay? And it's a simple is that nobody really wants to sit and go through that whole process now with our high school seniors when they're getting their favorite image on the cover of the album, I might let them choose that cover image if they asked, but I don't even put that out there if they don't ask about it from the beginning so we're designing their albums for them they're priced at the top level of the category so that it makes it very, very sick nimble with our seniors we've got three levels of albums with our families and first your clients it's one album it's priced one way so they're getting what we offer it's a yes or a no and it makes it all very very simple in a very easy decision with our real kids it's the lay flat press album from a c I and it's just a simpler album it's a lot less expensive for us to produce and so we can therefore offer it at a lot less for those special event sessions that we d'oh another product that I really love are the image boxes and I actually am loving these more and more all the time and one of the reasons is is when it gets down to the end of the session and our clients really do want keepsake of all of their images or all of their favorite images we can offer an album or we can offer an image box as that final product and of course the image boxes they're going to be a lot easier to create then an album and the price point is not a whole lot different so inside of our image boxes we've got ten mounted prints and that's how those air sold and these air nice you know mounted prints that we can let the client know that, you know, some of our clients like to just have that keepsake in the box with those ten favorite images, some people framed them separately and some people set them out on easels and you can even set them all on an easel by your image box and rotate images out day today and that's fun too, so, you know, just different ways to show them that they can use the box and we show our boxes in the five by seven and eight by ten size, this is eight by ten I used the same image, typically when I'm showing two different size is just so that they can see, you know, really the difference in the image boxes be a little harder to tell if it was two different, you know, families or two difference that's a kid, so we're showing those in those ways, and I love love love selling the image boxes, and then I always want to make sure that I'm recommending press print product to our clients. And right now we've got a box of holiday cards that is always sitting out when our clients come in and we we do like our clients to sit and look through the box there's a ton of cards in here from over the years, uh, trying to keep it relatively current, but we've got, you know, just all different styles, hand sizes and, you know, different things that they can do, and then we also have them or we recommend to them to do matching labels for the outside of their envelope as well a cz gift tags and stickers that they can put on their packages and anything that we can tie in to make it all. And, you know, just once we've got the design done, we can pull the elements over to use for other pieces thank you cards we can do also, but I want to recommend these pieces and love love having our clients have them because these are paid for mailing pieces that are going to go out in the mail, they're going to dress, they're going to stamp, they pay for. And so I really feel like this is just a great, great former marketing as well as our clients, having something really special to be able to send out to their friends and family. And then this is kind of like the albums when it comes to design, I want our clients to look through the box and just kind of point out things that they like, I want them to tell me the colors that they're attracted to, you know, we wanted to go christmas see green and red. Or we don't want to go christmas, he green and what we liked the plum in silver, whatever. I want them to tell me the colors that they like and they're gonna end up giving me their quotes any burbage that's going to go in the card and then I'm going to tell them the same thing that I told them when we're working on their albums and that is, you know, I've got all your favourites already selected, so I'll just be pulling from your yes is to create your card and every once in a while they might choose that one favorite family photo that they want on the front or something like that, but it's, not a lot of time that's being spent in the design process with the client, I wanted to be a yes, we want our cards and then move on. I don't want to drag that part of it out so that's, what we're doing with the holiday cards at different times of the year, we're recommending other kinds of products to our clients because I really do want them to have those press products in their hands and getting them out to their friends and family.