WIth June the 1/2 way mark of the year, how is the market for you all going?
I am in the North East (NEW ENGLAND) market, things are bright, and I have slowed down my June on purpose to take some time with the family, but have started to look toward July and beyond.
Anyone spot any new trend in the market?
Loved the Photo Booth tip looks like that is something that would go over very well for the Bridal Show ramp up to wedding season.
T&I Market has been good, but I am looking for a new lab, mine has grown and turn around time is SLOW.
Ed
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
I got my first T&I in April and a second in May. It was a learning experience to be sure! My lab was slow too - they blamed it on 'too many orders' but they told me to send each team as a seperate order...What I found interesting was how poorly they seemed to handle the whole deal - 400 kid on 50 teams is about average from what everyone told me so I expected them to be old hands at this and have all the answers. Not so, and by a long shot. They pulled it off fine in the end. The time was slower than I wanted but the first league held the stuff for another 10 days. It was a lot more frustrating than any wedding!
With that stuff, a couple of weddings and a lot of engagement shoots, a couple of seniors and a big jump in babies May's sales exceeded all of 2006! So I was busy- busier than I expected, busier than I really wanted to be.
Wedding bookings have picked up a bit of late and I expect July to be better on that score. I do see price pressure on that area of my business, moreso than in the past. I guess the economy and that will continue - no or less home equity for parents to tap for weddings and the price of gas is starting to change the economy and behavior around here.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
I have started to wonder if adding shipping to the T&I would help. I have had leagues do that before (Hold off on distributing the orders) mostly due to the way the coaches get their box from the league.
The headache of sending out 400 orders, (I have not seen this as an option for me).
My lab, MidWestSports, is great quality and products, just seemed to be very busy (like most) with a 15 business day turn around, for baseball orders.
Perhaps it is me, I do not have a digital workflow software, and I should see if this would help speed up the process, but for ease they are great.
HOWEVER a feature I really would love, is a way to drop ship re-ships, I currently use printroom for reships (*Costs more*) but saves time for errors (which are mostly due to non legible hand writting from parents).
For the record, I do not think I would save any time if I had to do more work myself but I found 15 days to be a LONG time.
This lab did not want the pictures grouped by team, they wanted it in one big directory with each order form with the picture number on it.
(That was depressing because I did group them by team).
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
my lab (profilmet.com) sells all sorts of things so I figured they know how to do it. We did each team as a seperate order via their ROES, and put a team photo at the end of each kid's order (if there was one). They bagged and labeled each kid and grouped by team for 40c ea including the window envelope. The did this by image/file number - so if there was a single 5x7 team photo they had no way to know who it went to, so it went at the end. So far it looks like they made no mistakes!
We shot saturday and had 75% of it all ordered by tues eve at 1am. Had a few we couldn't read etc so we called parents and waited for call backs...that takes a few days. We have everything in the lab's hands by the weekend (they don't work weekends).
that was a week on us. I was hoping for 2 to 4 day turnaround (they generally guarantee 2 day,but they're subletting press stuff so that can add a day or 2). they had it almost 10 business days. We had a deal with the league to deliver by day 21(23 weeks) and we beat that by 4 days, but I feel we should have been quicker (it wasn't really us anyway).
H&H color lab has dedicated software (ezevent) and a scanner deal that makes this whole thing error free and you can get 1 week total turnaround - shoot this sat and deliver next sat! IF you get a league roster ahead of time. If not you'll be typing things in as you go. It automatically puts the packages together, groups teams, etc. Software is free but the scanner is $200 last I checked. If you only do a league or two a year it's prolly more hassle to learn and de-bug the workflow, but if you shoot a lot it's the way I'd go.
I'm mailing out the remakes on my dime this time around. Not that many (less than 1% had any issues at all, mostly our not putting the right name on the item - ROES holds it ). For all we did I'm pretty happy with the error rate.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
I should note, that I had the full service, IE send in the order forms and the lab does all the Data entry and packaging. Shoot Saturday, I do a data entry of the parents name and address for my own record, the lab gets it Tuesday morning at the latest.
If I did not care about the data entry (addresses) I could fedex out on Saturday for Monday Delivery.
I do not want to be Data Entry guy IMO
Errors this season were small, but annoying (usually a special case kid) IE Parent wanted 3 kids in a picture lab freaked out not sure which team to put in.
I am very impressed with the quality, and if you are doing the same for reships I guess I will continue to eat it too.
My only problem is reorders if I do a midwest the turn around is longer but costs less than PR
Oh the joys of management.
EJS
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
I have had a great spring season with T&I and other new work. I have noticed that my action sales have gone down this year. I've heard it from others and it seems to be because of the economy.
As far as labe, I also use Midwest and have been very happy with their quality. They have probably the best quality of many labs I have used and also great template designs. Their turn around used to be fast but I also experienced slow times this spring. Supposedly they have now geared up enough and expect to be back on track in time for the fall season.
I send them the envelopes in the order the pictures were shot in, and not by team order. It's easy for me since we pile the envelopes after we write the image #, so they are usually in the right order. A few are out of order since parents sometimes don't have their order ready, so after we mark the # down they take back the envelope to pick what they want.
It takes me 5-10 minutes to check them after removing the payments.
I like that I don't have to do any data entry with them and everything comes back sorted by team with each kid packaged.
Before I went to Midwest, I looked into H&H since I heard so much about their system with the bar codes. My problem with them was template designs, which IMHO are poor. Most are just different colors with the sport name. None have actual pictures on them, like a field, ball, etc.
I do use them for portrait work and things where I need a fast turnaround and their quality is great. I submit via LabPrints software and upload the images. They normally ship in 1 business day. My rep there also agrees about the poor templates.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
I've had a horrendous year at motorsports events, but the wedding business is going well. I've been working to expand my abilities and range of work, to include more portraiture, work with models, etc.
I'm (still) contemplating selling my event trailer. I think the trailer would be great for someone with an untapped market; but for me, its time has pretty much come and gone.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
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