S14E05 | From global brand management to commercial pet photography
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How would you like to have repeat clients, purchasing only digitals, coming back to you multiple times per year? That’s what your calendar can look like as a commercial pet photographer.
Today’s guest, Rowan Williams has a background in high level marketing and brand management- and today uses that knowledge to successfully offer commercial pet photography.
She shared what that entails including creating briefs and pricing structures plus in the members extended episode we covered charging for dog models, the impact of Reels and Tik Tok and of course- marketing!
WE COVERED:
Rowan’s marketing background
The charity that introduced Rowan to dog photography
Briefs and getting the information for shot lists
Rowan’s pricing structure and when she collects the funds
EXTENDED MEMBERS-ONLY EPISODE:
The difference between Small business Vs Big Business as clients
Sourcing and paying dog Models
Impact of video and Reels
Where Rowan’s small business clients find her
How big business book Rowan
The different options that clients need
MENTIONED LINKS:
Upcoming workshop: Successfully launch a profitable commercial pet photography offering!
Mayhew - The charity Rowan supports
Dubsado - For client management and automating contracts / invoices
Narrative Select - For AI assisted culling
ImagenAI - For AI assisted lightroom editing
Link’s to Pooch & Pineapple Dog Photography:
Website: poochandpineapple.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/poochandpineapple
Instagram: www.instagram.com/poochnpineapple
Get into profitable commercial pet photography
Rowan is guest instructing a workshop in May to help you launch a commercial pet photography offering.
If you’d love to learn step by step how to win big brands as clients, book local small businesses and understand things like usage rights and briefs.. Then this Zoom workshop is for you!
Places will be strictly limited for the live workshop to ensure your questions can be answer.
Rowan Williams
Pooch & Pineapple Dog Photography, UK
Rowan Williams lives in Sheffield with her large rescue dog George. She has been a professional photographer since 2015 and creates colourful, eye-catching photos packed with personality for dog lovers and pet brands.
Rowan strives to tell stories with her images, and likes to get to know her clients, making the photoshoot as relaxed and fun as possible.
Having previously worked in marketing, and qualified with The Chartered Institute of Marketing, Rowan is passionate about creating images that truly capture the essence of her clients, whether that's a beloved pet or a pet business.
Transcript
The reason I've been so keen to chat with you Rowan is because you are doing something quite different in your business to what we see across pet photography around the world, in fact.
Which is that you are actively going out and marketing, commercial photography for pet related businesses on your, your dog photography website. So, I see that it's listed there as like its own little portfolio, or not little, but its own portfolio. It's listed as like, you know, Find out, you know, book your shoot that it's split between two between pet owners and pet business photography.
So I wanna talk about that a little bit because I did realize after I did like a bit of digging, I found this side. I was like, excited about what you're doing. And I learned that before photography. I think you were a brand manager or something, is that
correct? Yeah, that's right. So I have a corporate background which.
Very, very dull and nowhere near as exciting as being a pet photographer, . I was a brand manager for a pharmaceutical company and I started off in that business. I worked in sales for a little bit and then I did, I was very interested in marketing. And then I went and did a qualification with the Chartered Institute of Marketing, which is a UK based kind of like the.
Gold standard of, of marketing education. Lots of different education institutions will offer courses that are accredited by c i m. So yeah, that's kind of, if you're, if you're a corporate marketer in the uk then you generally get a qualification with the Chartered Institute of Marketing. I'd highly recommend them if anyone is like a big marketing nerd like me, because I really love their courses.
But I qualified with them. And then I went and worked for the same drugs company actually. I worked in the UK as a product manager and then I lived abroad and worked in Brussels as a global marketing manager, like working very much on sort of brand strategy. And then I came back to the UK and worked on a launch product, which was really interesting.
And then I got to 30 and. I need to have less stress and more fun in my life. I think I'll become self-employed because that's a really Stressless lifestyle. , you didn't quite get the memo, did you? No, I definitely did not. . Nice, nice.
Okay, so, okay, that's quite a change. I mean like a global brand management for a pharmaceutical company to micro pet photography business.
I imagine when you. First started out, it was super, super tiny and it actually, it wasn't pets that you first started with, was it? So maybe just give a little brief overview of how you've gone from pharmaceuticals to photography and then eventually kneeing down into, into pets as your primary offer
now.
Yeah, sure. So I actually started out shooting weddings and that was entirely by accident because I. Went and did a few photography courses and I kind of became friendly with a group of photographers who mainly shot weddings and I wasn't really kind of interested in weddings at all cause I really thought that they were sort of like that very, sort of like cheesy 1990s style big poofy wedding dress.
But actually my friends in the wedding industry really opened my eyes to the fact that weddings can be pretty much anything anyone wants them to be. And ordinarily they're not that like 1990s style, sort of like Princess Diana, big poofy wedding dress. And yeah, so I started probably in 2008 shooting weddings and.
Very much like niched into a very sort of like alternative wedding market. And I shoot quite a lot of people who are getting married for the second time round, or same-sex couples who are getting married. They generally tend to be getting married in sort of like quite alternative venues as well. So that was really fun and I did really enjoy that because it's a lot of variation throughout the course of a day, I found myself.
Having lots of clients that had dogs obviously as well, which was wonderful. But I was living down in London when I was doing that. At the same time, I lived next to an animal rescue center called the Mecu Animal Home which your listeners in London will probably have heard of. And I used to volunteer with them, and I worked right across their charity.
So I would work in the kennels, photographing their dogs, but then also in the cattery, photographing the cats. They have a veterinary clinic there as well. I would photograph the vets, not just seeing the patients, but also scrubbing into theater and photographing them, actually working with their patients.
Cause they have a big training program there for veterinary students. And then they also have a, an outreach program as well into the community where they do education, but then they also do veterinary care and microchipping and spaying for homeless people who have pets as well. That kind of opened my eyes to the variance of working with animals and how interesting that could be.
And I really enjoyed that very sort of like documentary approach. Mm-hmm. . Yeah, so that's really kind of like, What landed me into dog photography, but then with the pandemic in 2020, that is definitely what forced me a little bit more. Because I found it was, it was, I mean, obviously it was stressful like for everybody, but in March, 2020, I think I, there was a space of a week where I had 25 wedding bookings.
Just say, we're not going ahead this year, and it was utterly horrendous where my business basically just dried up overnight. So I was forced to look into other means of bringing in an income stream whilst events weren't able to go ahead. Mm-hmm. . And I really kind of like focused a bit more on pets and when the lockdown restrictions in the UK were lifted, was starting to do more pet photo shoots and they were very casual as well to begin.
It was kind of like just meeting up and going for a little walk and taking some nice photos. So starting quite slowly, but. When not, obviously the UK lifted all the restrictions, which if my memory serves me correctly, was at the beginning of 22. It feels like a blur. .
It's hard
track, isn't it?
Yeah, it really is. And then I found that I was shooting mainly pet stuff actually. I really enjoyed it. And at the moment I'm still shooting my rescheduled weddings from 2020. Here we are, beginning of 2023 and the pandemic and its legacy still lingers on. And I have my last wedding from Covid scheduled in August, 2024.
And this year I'm probably only gonna be shooting about five weddings. And the bulk of my business is now pet photography. And specifically the bulk of my business is working with pet businesses which suits me perfectly. I get to roll around with animals, which I love. But then I also get to really be quite nerdy with my marketing and chat, kind of like the commercial end of, of image creation, which is exactly two things that I love.
Yeah. Well, and it also sounds like you have the perfect experience behind you as well, because not only. , you know, do you understand the branding perspective because of your education and your ex experience in that field? But also, you know, you got started with pets by working with this rescue organization where you are actually doing more commercial kind of photos.
I mean, when, from what you're describing, I mean, when, when we think of volunteer work for shelters or rescues, usually we're picturing. , you know, the, the portion that you mentioned that you do as well, but only that, which is Yeah. The adopt the dogs for adoption, you know, all cats, you know. Yeah. Just look the profile pictures and, and often it doesn't really go beyond that, but sounds like you were really involved throughout the entire organization and capturing all the different aspects, which is really what you're doing for now.
Commercial brands like pet photography sorry. Pet business brands as well. Right. The same
style. Yeah, yeah, totally that. So it was really about documentary and I remember when I was talking with the marketing manager at the Mayhew on that initial job, and like it was very clear in the brief that they wanted for every photo of an animal, there had to be a human in there as well.
Mayhew really pride themselves on being an animal charity, but with a human focus. And they're very much about sort of like community outreach and the role. Humans play in the care of animals. So all the images that I shot for them were of their kennel team kind of looking after the dogs or the cattery team looking after the animals.
Like there was always a human in the photo. So it wasn't standalone fine art. Photos of the, of the animals that were, that were available for, for adoption. It was really documentary photography of what happens on the inside of the charity and how much that charity cares as well which I absolutely loved.
I, I just, it was so interesting.
Yeah, definitely. I imagine it would be eyeopening so. Let's use that as an example actually, because you just mentioned the word brief. The brief I received, which is probably something that most pet photographers I think would not have experience with that. So this organization that you're, you are volunteering for, are you still helping them out on.
Yeah, I do. Although I live in Sheffield now, so, which is about two and a half hours on the train from London. So I don't get to go there as often as I would like to. And I probably go twice a year and I spend a day with them and it's a real nonstop kind of day where I absolutely just, I mean, we don't even break for lunch.
We just like keep on going and I've already tight time scheduled to get round all the different stuff. But yeah, I've, I've, I've been with them for some time now and it's, it's. It's really emotional, like seeing how much they've grown as an organization and the kind of work that they're doing as well.
Mm-hmm. ,
I imagine. Okay. So when you first started volunteering with the organization, you mentioned that they gave you this brief or there was a discussion of the brief, so just. Can we break that down a little bit and just discuss like what were the expectations? How did they deliver those to you?
Did you have to draw it out of them or, you know, it sounds like it was, it's a pretty big organization, so perhaps there's appropriate people to kind of work with this work with you on it. But yeah, just give us a bit of an idea like how a big scale project like this might, might.
Yeah, so the Mayhew were rebranding at the time, so they were changing all of their logo and their website.
And they'd worked with a creative agency who had put together everything that you see. So all the nice colors and the logo and. Really kind of like specifying what their, what their organization was about. And when I work with any pet business, and it doesn't matter whether it's a small kind of like one person making stuff for dogs in their dining room table or whether it's a really, really big brand, I always start with.
Tell me what your business is about. So what is it that you do? Who is it for? What are the values attached to all of that? So we, I have a good kind of like helicopter overview of what that business is about and, and what the brand encompasses. And then we get down into the nitty gritty of talking about, let's talk about exactly what kind of images you need.
And very often the smaller the business, I find they don't have a defined list or defined understanding of what it is that they need. So I need to do a little bit more legwork in terms of pulling that out of them and asking them the right questions to find out. How they use images where they use them, what kind of messages they, they want to kind of like portray with, say, for example, their social media or on their website.
Like what kind of feelings do they want to emote outta someone looking at the image? And. From that first initial meeting, what will, what is then kind of comes out of that is a briefing document which is just my way of writing everything down and just making sure that I completely understand what they're about and what they want to get out of working with me.
And that's pretty much what the brief is. Like, one of the reasons why I love marketing so much is it's just. Common sense and clarity, and I am someone who always really, really strives to find clarity in things. And I ask a lot of probably stupid questions, but. You know, I just like to be really, really clear about things.
Well, no, I think it's important, isn't it? I mean, if you don't understand or you haven't grasped their vision, or they haven't defined their vision yet, then how can you deliver a result that they're gonna be satisfied with at the end of the day? So the more you ask, it makes sense to me. So, . Okay. It sounds like it's actually a lot of work on the, at the beginning, when you're first working with this client compared to working with a private client.
Is that correct?
Yeah, totally. So I I have a customer journey mapped out already, and I tend to use roughly the same process for every single client, whether it. A local dog trainer or a really big brand that I'm working with, when they've decided that they want to go ahead and actually work with me, I issue them a contract.
They pay a little deposit on my invoice as well to get the project started, and then I send them a little questionnaire. The questionnaire is questions from me that I, this is kind of like. The bones of the structure of the information that I need. Once that is completed, I'll kind of like start thinking about, these are the kinds of shots that we might want to.
Aim for during the shoot, and then we'll have a video call where we chat through everything and I, and I just confirm my understanding and I give them some ideas and we kind of flesh those ideas out. I always stress to clients, it's a really collaborative process because I want to make sure that not only are they, are they benefiting from my expertise, but they're also kind of, Playing with it and we'll, we'll get our minds bubbling together and outta that meeting.
What I generally then get is the shot list, which is, this is roughly what we're gonna be aiming for. This is where we're gonna shoot everything. These are the dogs that we are going use. These are the products that we are going to use. These are the props that need to be pulled in. And then, yeah, from the, from the shot list, then we have the production schedule of what's gonna happen during the.
Well, okay. We have
so much to break down from that . I'm looking at the,
there's like a little timer
at the top of my screen and I'm like, holy moly, this is gonna go over time. Sorry, . No, this is great. I mean, hopefully you've got time. So let's start at the beginning. So on kind of the beginning, so you said at some point along there, You do all of this work, it's way more work than, or it is more work than working with a private client.
At least in the beginning. You are finding out things like models and props and time scheduling and all of this kind of stuff before you know well and truly like at the beginning. But you also mentioned that. Once they've decided that they're gonna go ahead, they pay a deposit. Mm-hmm. . So can you give us a bit of an idea, like, how does that work?
Are you quoting per job or is it like, you know, they pay like just a little bit to book the time and then they purchase per image? How does the pricing breakdown for you,
Rowan? So that's a really good question because I have recently changed my pricing structure and I was quoting on an hourly rate basis.
However, as I've done jobs on an hourly rate basis, what I found is that things always run over and the less organized the client is. The more it runs over. And I also find as well that when I deliver the images, what they want is a lot more images than what we initially talked about, which is understandable.
That's human nature. You know, they're seeing like a selection of their, their baby, their, their, their brand. Kind of like come to life. And of course you're gonna want, you'll be like, yeah, I want it all. It sounds great, . But just I think to. Clarify what's really important to them, but then also as well, to protect my time and to put some boundaries around it as well.
I now charge on a per image basis, and I find that that pricing structure has actually been easier for clients to understand from the outset. and it's also helps them to clarify their thinking as well. So I'm definitely someone that likes a lot of feedback. I really kind of like thrive on external validation, so I constantly check in with clients throughout the process of, is this the right thing of what we're aiming for?
Like, here's a shot list. Do you need more? Do you need less? Like here's the first draft of all the images. Pick out the ones that you really love. Do you need more? Do you need. And then finally I kind of like take the draft images and then I go away and I do the research on them. And then the job is kind of like finalized and the bill is settled on the, on the per image basis on the pricing.
And there's always like a, like a little bit of variance as well, but I really try to kind of like. Help clients understand and prioritize what's super important in terms of what they want from the images, rather than it just being like, oh, I love all 100 images. I'll just have all of those. And I'm like, cool, that's gonna take me like two days to retouch.
So , can you just be a bit more clear about things and then Yeah. They figure it out. Mm-hmm. .
That makes sense. So just to clarify then, once they see the images, they will decide on the final number of how many they're purchasing. But you mentioned they're paying a deposit. So in the beginning, are they paying, like you know, they've suggested or we're probably you've worked out together, we're probably gonna need to take 50 images, and so then you are paying them like, eh, sorry, you're charging them a deposit based off
that or, yeah, absolutely.
So one of the first questions I always ask clients as well is about their budget, like, I, I always like, I'm very clear as all my prices are on my website. By the way, if people want to go and see how much I charge, like that's totally fine. I always ask clients right from the outset, so, What kind of budget are we working with here?
And I tend to like find the bigger the brand, the more clear they will be about that. So when, when I was a marketing manager, I knew ex like you have a specific budget already in mind for what it is you wanna spend. On a project and it's just, it's just really helpful for creatives. I, I always found from a marketing manager's point of view, it was really helpful for creatives.
If I say to them, I wanna produce an ads campaign and I've got seven grand to spend, like, what can we do for that? And. I, I tend to find that that's the way that my clients will roll with it as well. For the smaller clients, like say for example, a local dog trainer there's usually a little bit more sort of like education on my side in terms of, okay, this is what you wanna achieve, but this is what we can, we can do with the money that you have, because I wanna be helpful for them and I wanna make sure that.
Produce a set of images that they use time and time again and they get loads of value out of,
yeah. Okay. That makes total sense. So, okay, so they're paying a small deposit in the beginning and on average, like what kind of deposit? Are you talking like a couple of hundred
pound or? Yeah, usually. So I it's 25% of the.
Kind of like the initial invoice, and that's just to kind of get rolling with, with the planning. They also sign a contract as well. And the contract is basically, that's the, that's the order of work. Like that's the minimum that they've like signed up for that they're actually saying that they're gonna do.
So everyone is kind of like, Agreed to how much money is going to exchange. And I'm super clear as well, all the way on along the line about how much things will cost because I know from working, working in marketing, like very often there's a brand manager and they're going back and they're having to justify their spending to an accountant or.
If they're a small business like a local dog trainer, then you know, they're really watching the pennies just to make sure that they can actually keep a profitable business themselves. So I'm very transparent about these things. I, and I get feedback from people saying it's really helpful actually, that.
They have that education cuz I have clients that say to me, I really wanna work with you and I love your work, but we can't afford you at the moment. And that's fine, that's totally cool. Like, you know, there's a lead magnet on my website for them to sign up to so they can still get value from interacting with me, but their business one day will be big enough for them to be able to pay to work with me and I love that idea.
Mm-hmm. .
Yeah.
That's a really nice philosophy. And you know, Rowan, actually on that note, I think we might wrap up part one cuz it's a nice done. And in part two, I really wanna dive even deeper into this, like into, you just mentioned like, you know, you want everyone to know exactly how much things are gonna cost.
So I wanna talk about that. Like, what do you mean by that? Are you talking about like, you know, paying for models or props or this kind of thing? I really wanna get into that. I wanna get into the different options that you offer in terms of commercial, who you are. Yeah, where your income is coming from in terms of the client.
And yeah, whatever else, the com, wherever else the conversation goes as well. So for now yeah, let's wrap up part one. Otherwise, I'm gonna be keeping you here all day. But before we do that, how can the listener find you? What's the best place for them to go? You mentioned the
website earlier.
Yep. So my website is www.poochandpineapple.com. I'm also on Instagram quite a lot. And that is Pooch N Pineapple. That's my handle. I post that regularly, quite there. . There's quite a lot in my stories as well. There's quite a few blogs on my website as well that explain things to my clients about how I work and the kind of work that I do.
So that's also worth looking at Facebook as well. I'm pooch and pineapple on Facebook and yeah, that's probably the main places where I show up at the moment. Okay,
perfect. I'll pop links to all of those in the show notes anyway, so if you did miss any of those guys, just jump over to the show notes.
You can just head to the pet photographers club.com/v podcast and search Rowan and you'll find all the notes on that episode. Now don't forget that if you are a member of the club, you can jump on over to your member zone or the rss private RSS feed to continue listening to the rest of this episode, which from what I'm getting so far, is definitely gonna be full of some gold.
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