July 1st marks our 23rd anniversary. As I look back on how the industry has changed since we opened for business in 1995, our story can be told in a few chapters:
1995 – 2002 – Start Up & Matted Albums: Our original business plan talked about making the highest quality wedding albums, AND making them easy to order. Back then 90% of the professional wedding albums we made were Matted Albums, and they were produced from the photos photographers sent to us!.
2002 – 2010 – Going Digital: Digital cameras changed EVERYTHING about the business. Matted Albums gave way to lay-flat digital albums, we started printing photos in Deerfield, technology became paramount, and the barrier to enter our industry as either a photographer, album company or print lab had been lowered forever :(.
2011 – 2018 – Product Innovation & Services: Price pressure affected all vendors in the Pro Photo ecosystem and many companies haven’t raised prices since! Photographers were asking us for help escaping the digital dungeon, which resulted in the launch of our Album Design Service on 2011. We have since added a Selection Service, an upsell shopping cart and later this year we’ll launch editing :). A lot has changed at Zookbinders over the past few years. We launched the most unique wedding album in the industry in 2016 (The Bon a Vie), and just introduced the EZ Book and some other new features in 2018. We’ve rebranded our marketing to “Albums are just the beginning…” to talk more about our services, and remain fiercely committed to the pro photographer. We have been blessed to continue to work with many of the same photographers who gave a new company a chance back in 1995. We’ve even hired lots of our clients over the years, as our support team is now mostly comprised of working photographers. Although we are now 23 years-old, we still have the same DNA we had as a start up: fiercely committed to providing great photographers with the best quality wedding albums, and the outsource services you need to run a small business more efficiently. Oh, and if you want to talk to somebody about how you can grow your sales and/or increase your profits, I’m here to help!
