Yesterday you had a peek at the packaging we offer for your prints, so today I am going to introduce you to our Welcome Packet.  When a client calls to book their session, within a few days they will receive our fun packed folder with TONS of information.  In the left pocket you will find the Session Details sheet and the Session Listing sheet.  The Session Details page will give you a brief description of what to expect during the session, clothing suggestions, information regarding your print order and information about our custom editing we offer.  In the center pocket, the first thing you will find are two framing guides.  One guide gives you framed prints or canvas options for your walls, while the other guide gives you  print and canvas options for your shelves and stairways.  Behind those guides you will find an information card detailing the custom photo jewelry we offer our clients from Planet Jill.  Also included in this pocket are the A La Carte Pricing List, the Print Collections page and our Ordering Guide.  Finally you come to the pocket on the right.  The first item you come across is a small envelope detailing our referral program.  Behind that are two trifold cards giving you detailed information for your Pregnancy Portraits and Newborn Portraits.  Behind the Newborn Portraits trifold is our Breast feeding food guide.  This card is simply provided to give you some helpful suggestions to follow prior to your session.  The suggestions are geared towards helping your little one feel their best during their session.  Behind these bits of information you will then find the Session Pricing card.  Lastly, we didn’t want to end there, so we also include our super cute sticky note pad and pen for you to keep!

We hope you like what you see and we can’t wait to send you your packet when you call to book your session!

When I really started to move full steam ahead this past October with my business, I knew I had a long road ahead of me.  Aside from needing to be behind my camera shooting as much as I could, I also had so much to do on the business side of things.  If you start digging around, which I did and I still do on a daily basis, you will see that being a professional photographer is not just about the photos you take – it’s also about the brand you create for your business.  Branding, branding, branding, is something that I read about every single day.  Getting your brand out there and being able to represent the business behind your brand is very important.  After reading everything I had read about branding, I knew that I had to get a logo designed and it had to fit 100% with what I envisioned as my brand.  For the logo I knew I wanted the heart in it and I knew the colors I wanted and I was even so specific as to what font I wanted and what color of dots I wanted in the heart.  The graphic designer that created it made it exactly the way I wanted it to be and I love the finished product.  Getting that task completed was such a huge relief, but it wasn’t even a dent in the whole project of getting the rest of my brand developed.

One of my first clients had me do a custom editing job for her and I remember thinking, what the heck am I going to put these prints in when I get them back from my print lab???  I looked around and had nothing except for Ziploc baggies and trash bags.  I felt awful about not having anything to package her photos in, so I ended up giving them to her in the bag from the printer with the brown cardboard pieces from the box on each side – ughh!

From that moment on I knew I would have to dedicate some SERIOUS time and effort coming up with my packaging as well as my marketing.  I needed to come up with the Welcome Packet and every single piece of information to go in that packet, along with the packaging we would use to present our clients with their finished products.  For the past three weeks I have been holed up working on creating all of our marketing and taking numerous trips to downtown LA to work with the wholesalers on getting the packaging together.  It isn’t fancy, but it is exactly what I wanted and I feel that it fits my brand perfectly and ties into the whole color scheme of my logo.

The photos below are of the packaging.  Part 2 of this post will come tomorrow when I introduce you to the Welcome Packet and tell you all about what you will find in it!