PUBLICATION CENTER

How Studio EnVogue in Dothan, Ala., found success by bringing everything, including direct niche advertising, in-house.

When Cindi McDaniel wanted to focus her studio’s efforts more toward children’s portrait photography she took total control of marketing to this niche market. Rather than rely on local and regional lifestyle magazines and other advertising methods to get her message out, she developed and produced her own local parenting magazine.

At first glance, this rather radical approach seems daunting indeed. Publishing your own magazine is no easy task, and McDaniel admits that everything involved in the process, including learning InDesign, was intimidating. But perseverance and dedication to growing a segment of her business she’s particularly passionate about would override any qualms she had about doing it.

“I immediately began searching for local advertising venues and found there was nothing that specifically targeted young parents. It was very frustrating because I was in the midst of trying to reinvent myself, but I knew exactly where I wanted to go with my business, and I had to find a way to make it happen,” says McDaniel.

And make it happen she did, plunging into InDesign, recruiting contributors, and printing a 6x9 booklet-style magazine distributed to hospitals, pediatricians, and other child and infant medical specialists. Now McDaniel is working on her third issue and is actually turning a small profit with the magazine as others in the community, including other photographers, see value in this new niche advertising vehicle.

The snowball effect of the magazine’s success has not only exceeded McDaniel’s new-customer expectations, each issue has taken less time and effort as volunteers line up to contribute their expertise and fill each magazine with interesting and insightful content.

“I made it clear from the beginning that I didn’t want to do this alone. I want to take photographs. One of the first contributors, a birthing coach who offers healthy pregnancy workshops at Babies ‘R’ Us, helped to get our magazine into their stores. I had such an overwhelmingly positive response and it’s taken off from there,” says McDaniel. “My suggestion for other photographers is that if you want to grow a segment of your photography, first find out if there’s a local publication like this. If there is, and you’re determined to spend your advertising dollars in print ads, that’s where you need to put your money. Or, work with organizations that cater to the market segment you’re after and provide them with photography services. I have thrown away thousands of dollars on lifestyle magazines. You have to target the market you’re going for; otherwise you’re throwing your advertising dollars away.”

The In-House Difference

McDaniel has developed this hands-on approach to her photography, marketing, and business through hard-learned lessons. After working her way through the ranks of Sears Portrait Studios as an employee, store manager, and district manager for about nine years, McDaniel struck out on her own.

Those early years, relates McDaniel, were somewhat miserable. “I was offering a subpar product, and I was willing to settle for that. I figured if I was saving money on prints by sending them out, I would make more money. What I failed to realize at the time was that by serving up a lesser product I wasn’t building a business and earning repeat customers,” she says.  “Age and experience have graced me with a wealth of knowledge and understanding of what it takes to truly be successful and become a respected photographic professional.”

Crisis illuminates problems. For some, that illumination leads to greater discouragement. For others, like McDaniel, a crisis reveals opportunity and new direction. That new direction for McDaniel was to bring everything in-house; to have total control over the process and educate clients about the difference this brings to their entire experience with professional photography.

“I turned into a control freak,” laughs McDaniel. “The first time I got a print the way it was supposed to be was when I bought my first Epson professional printer almost four years ago. It’s made my life easier, and I tell my clients I could buy prints cheaper for them, but it’s more about quality now than it ever was before. What we’ve seen since then is a huge shift in repeat customers, because they know quality is absolutely number one with us. We want them to walk out the door knowing they got the best possible product they could get.”

McDaniel adds that not every client or potential client understands that paper is not just paper, but a medium that offers a unique expression. She says that when she first came into the market in Dothan, Ala., a little over four years ago, she could hardly sell an 8x10 print for more than $25.

“I was beating my head up against the wall. We had to educate our clients about the difference between it being just a picture on a piece of paper and having a piece of art made, which means having it printed in a quality format and offering canvas, fine-art, and fine-photo papers. To my knowledge, I’m the only photographer in our area that has fine art prints with hand-painted accents on display; I encourage our clients to feel the textures and experience the quality. It was very much an untapped market, and we had the variety and quality we were able to get from LexJet on our side by offering more variety and consequently more products,” says McDaniel. “As an artist, you have to be a control freak. If you don’t care about your end product, what are you doing? If all we care about is the camera experience, we’re really not artists. It’s imperative that you take control of the end product. If you don’t, it’s a constant battle. Our clients are paying us to have a trained eye; they trust us to make that decision about the quality of what’s going to hang on their wall.”

Printing with an Epson 4800 and 7880, McDaniel’s materials of choice are mainly LexJet’s Sunset Photo eSatin Paper, Epson Somerset Velvet, and Epson Premium Canvas Satin. The canvas product is a relatively new addition to the product mix at Studio EnVogue since McDaniel wasn’t sure how her market would receive it and she wasn’t sure how her photography would reproduce on it.

“When we started offering canvas portraits our clients went wild over it. We were nervous about printing on canvas at first, so we started with canvas sheets and did some promotions. We couldn’t keep it in stock. It’s exciting to see a mom’s reaction to a canvas print when they have never seen their child’s image in that format,” says McDaniel. “We’re honing our skills to sell larger prints, because the larger the print the better our profit margin. We want to sell wall art at this point; we’re getting away from smaller packages and becoming known for our wall presentations.”

Though Studio EnVogue offers the full gamut of portrait photography, the emphasis on children’s photography has taken McDaniel into uncharted marketing territory with the niche parenting magazine and has brought about aesthetic changes to the studio.

About a year ago, Cindi and her husband Ralph built a new studio, starting out with a fresh look primarily geared toward making children and their families comfortable and happy. In short, it’s a child-friendly environment, which reduces the chances of a tear-filled, stressful photo session.

“The studio has multiple design walls with bright colors and whimsical themes. We also found that having a slightly larger space helps make it more inviting as well. We placed much more emphasis on making the kids comfortable, and we’re having great success with children coming through the door and being able to fly through those sessions much easier than we were before,” says McDaniel. “We also shoot with the lights on, which is something I demanded after many years in a studio where children would immediately start to cry as they entered a dark room with minimal illumination from modeling lamps. It was all day long, one after the other crying. We don’t have that now. The kids aren’t freaked out when they walk into our larger and much brighter camera room.”

The McDaniels decorated their lobby with a “contemporary, eclectic, and artsy” look to help cement the studio in the minds of their clients, which also helps build repeat business. The studio’s philosophy can be best described in one word: differentiation.

“We wanted our studio to be memorable. We don’t want them to leave and then not be able to tell people about us because there was nothing really different about their experience or the studio itself. We’ve got some great photographers in the area, so we knew we had our work cut out for us. We had to immediately think of what we were going to do that would be different. We did not want to be just another studio decorated like the typical southern living room. That’s just not us, and we wanted the studio to reflect our personality as well,” says McDaniel.