With the start of a new year comes an opportunity to review my product lines, and this year I’ve made some exciting adjustments. As most of you know, I have long been loyal to my favorite album company Forbeyon, which is conveniently located right here in Dallas, Texas, and nothing has changed on that front. Their albums are still the highest quality, most beautiful albums available, and I’m proud to continue to feature them as the ONLY line of wedding albums I sell. However I have changed things up slightly, and now will be offering a new range of sizes. In the past I have only sold albums in square formats – 8×8, 10×10, 12×12, and so forth. However, after seeing Forbeyon‘s stunning 11×14 albums, I knew I had to incorporate those into my line. Starting in 2011, my new standard wedding album sizes will be 8×10 for the basic album package and 11×14 for upgraded packages. Fine Art Wedding Albums start at $2500.
If you’ve met with me in the last few months you’ve likely seen these albums already, but here is a glimpse of the gorgeous new sample albums Forbeyon created for me:
I love Forbeyon‘s beautiful full spreads that span the entire page with an almost invisible gutter, which allows me a ton of freedom in my album designs. I also love that Forbeyon albums lay completely flat, even on the first and last pages!
The blue album that you see below is the new Parent Album that I offer, which starts at $1250. It’s very similar to my normal wedding albums, with slightly thinner pages that make it easier to travel with and carry around. Below you can see the difference in thickness between the 8×10 30-page Parent Album (in blue) and the 8×10 30-page Wedding Album (in red).
A new product that I’m thrilled to be offering is Forbeyon‘s new Album Presentation Boxes. This is a gorgeous way to both display and preserve your album. The boxes can be made in a variety of designs to duplicate or complement your wedding album cover, and they include a ribbon pull that allows you to easily remove your album from the box without damaging either the box or the album. Additional matching folios can also be made to house your wedding day digital negatives, as well. Album Presentation Boxes start at $250.
Last but not least, I’ve made a huge revamp to my Proof Box offering. Full 4×6 proof sets are great gifts for parents or alternatives to traditional wedding albums. The Proof Box includes a beautifully custom-designed box featuring your names and wedding images, as well as a 4×6 print of every image from your wedding day proof set (limit 1000 images), and starts at $1250. Both the box and the 4×6 prints are provided by White House Custom Color, my professional printing lab of choice.
Unfortunately I will no longer be offering the Photobooth as an additional purchase. I can no longer reliably staff it, and I just don’t feel right selling a service I can’t guarantee consistent, experienced manpower for. Hopefully this service will resume in the future, but in the meantime, I highly recommend PushBooth, BoothBOOTH, and Photo Con Queso for all your photoboothing needs.
If you have any questions about the products I offer or my product pricing, feel free to send me an e-mail and let me know.
Also, if you’re a photographer and you’re headed to WPPI next week in Las Vegas, be sure to stop by the Forbeyon booth to see their unbeatable line of albums and presentation boxes and the WHCC booth to see the beautiful prints and other products they offer!
Tips for Photographers (T4P) is a weekly feature where I talk about a cool tip that I think will benefit my fellow photographers. For more T4Ps, click here!
Today’s Tip for Photographers is something that I talk about quite a bit already, but it’s super important so it’s always worthy of another mention. For me, albums are the cornerstone of my business. In my eyes, I sell two products – my time, and my albums. Those are the two biggest expenses on my pricelist, because they are the heart of what I do. Some people take photos to take photos, I take photos to create albums.
The company I use for my albums is absolutely wonderful and fantastic in every way. The company is called Forbeyon and they are a dream to work with. A few months ago I took a tour of their showroom and got a newfound respect for what they do. All of their albums are handmade, right here in Dallas Texas, with top of the line quality materials, and a rigorous quality inspection process. Since day one of working with Forbeyon, it has been obvious to me that the most important aspect of their business is creating a high-quality product, and I really respect that. I have looked into a lot of other album companies, but I always come back to Forbeyon. I could gush about them all day!! To learn more about the albums I offer, check out this page.
Although Forbeyon does have a design team that will create great album designs for you, I am a control freak so I choose to design my albums myself. I do this using the Page Gallery software by Yervant. Although I have had some issues with this software (their tech support is less than stellar), I really can’t live without it. It takes me about an hour to design a full 60-page wedding book, which is unheard of. It used to take me a week just to design a small book, now I can whip out 2-3 a day! It’s a template-based program, but has several options to customize pages, and it outputs PSD files so you can tweak them by hand, as well.
It blows my mind when I hear that some people are not even offering albums at all, let alone not offering them in their packages. If you’re not selling albums, not only are you providing your clients with an incomplete service, but you’re losing a lot of potential revenue. However, to sell a product, you have to have samples to show, so make sure you have several great, top of the line sample albums to take with you to client consultations. I have about 8-10 books altogether – one for each year I have been in the business, several duplicates of client’s books, a photobooth album, a details album, and a guestbook album. And don’t complain about how you can’t afford sample albums – a couple hundred invested in sample books will mean THOUSANDS of dollars in a return on your investment, if you price them correctly. Totally worth it!!