We’ve done a few blogs recently on why specializing helps more discerning clients find you. Being a niche expert makes you a sought-after professional. To continue that conversation, choosing vendors that specialize can elevate your brand and provide business support. Working with a professional wedding album company partners you with a team that knows the photography industry. A professional album company understands the process, from shoot to album, and can provide dedicated services and products to help your business thrive.
The Retailers
The printing industry is saturated. Advancements in laser and inkjet printing have put hundreds of options for printing images into the retail market. You can literally upload pictures from your phone and have a photo book sent to your house in a week. Big box retailers and office supply stores can create banner size canvases, prints, and books in 24 hours. While this excites a lot of consumers it does nothing to bolster the bank account of professional photographers looking to create a family’s first heirloom.
Additionally, retail printing options don’t meet the quality product standards that most professionals are looking for. While their price point may be nice – the craftsmanship and premium materials aren’t there. More importantly, the markup is missing. You can’t add margins to something that customers have seen, and know that they can purchase elsewhere.
The One-Stop Shop
There are many professional labs that offer a wide variety of products including professional wedding albums. Many photographers like the idea of a one-stop shop for all their printed products. For business owners, the ease of one login and one invoice is convenient. It’s like going to Wal-Mart or Target. These all-purpose stores have multiple departments and shopping there usually saves time.
Just like Target has its own brands like Archer Farms Boots and Barkley, bigger labs may choose to purchase white-labeled albums, canvases, or wood prints from other companies to sell under their own brand. Therefore, some product lines may originate from a different manufacturer. There is absolutely nothing wrong with these product distribution practices, it can keep overhead costs low when adding new items to a catalog and it satisfies a broader range of buyers. However, these final products are just that; the end result of a much larger project.
Professional Wedding Album Company
There may be times when you aren’t looking for everything under the sun at the lowest price. If your specific goal is to sell a custom wedding album to every couple, you may want to look for a professional wedding album company that has tools in place to help you do just that.
Weddings and events are a big commitment. They are scheduled months in advance and require a lot of planning. As the photographer, you are with clients all day long to capture every moment. The end result may be 2,000+ images to edit and deliver to the customer. And that’s just the beginning of the wedding album process.
Picking out an image to make into a canvas print is different from selecting 100 images for a wedding album. Coming up with a great wedding album design is a project all on its own that can take hours. Obviously, there is a lot of work that goes into creating a professional wedding album before it goes to print. Working with a professional wedding album company can help you tackle the to-do list that happened after “I do” is said.
Help Us Help You
Zookbinders, a professional wedding album company that’s been around for over 25 years, offers photographers tools and products to help navigate the album process.
Image Selection
Help your clients pick out the very best images for their flush-mount wedding album by letting our design team make recommendations for the perfect layout.
Increase Sales
In addition to helping clients choose images for their wedding album, the Zookbinders Selection Tool also allows photographers to offer their clients more images to their album and charge additional fees.
Album Design
The Zookbinders design team can create unique designs in 3 different styles. We also allow for 4 complimentary spread revisions so that photographers and their customers can make changes if needed.
In-House Production
All of Zookbinders albums are manufactured in Deerfield, Illinois, just outside Chicago. Our office staff and production crew communicate daily and have weekly meetings.
Business Partners
Zookbinder ONLY works business-to-business with professional photographers reselling albums to their clients. Consumers can’t purchase our albums and photographers can set their own profit margins.
Sales Tools
When our customers log into their ZookiePro accounts they have access to the ordering system, our catalog, and a pricing calculator. In addition, we have a worksheet for setting your profit margins, tutorial videos, and a premade marketing brochure that you can customize and share with clients.
Studio Samples
Showing clients actual handcrafted professional wedding albums is key to getting them to understand the difference between consumer photo books and professional flush-mount wedding albums. Zookbinders also offers a generous 50% off sample albums to help photographers increase their album sales.
When a vendor is focused on one product it’s because they do that one thing well. Working with a professional wedding album company means you’re not going to be able to order canvas wraps and photo buttons, but you will have access to the highest quality professional photographic albums for your clients. If you’re not a client already, learn more about how to get started with Zookbinders HERE. If you are a Zookbiner’s customer, we thank you for your continued partnership!
