I spent the weekend helping Emily with her stand at the National Wedding Show at the NEC.
If you chanced upon stand K78, you’d have found Emily Quinton Photography advertising her Birmingham wedding photography business, complete with three lovely metre-wide canvas prints of three of her best images, a DVD slideshow and all of the wedding photo albums out on show.
It being Emily’s first appearance at the show we really didn’t know to expect. We’d heard that many photographers take a stand there each year and get their year’s worth of photography bookings. We only had ten days to pull the stand together because it gets booked up over a year in advance, but due to someone pulling out we got their stand as a cancellation. So - “keep it simple, stupid” was the order of the day. We didn’t want to cover the stand in photographs, photo books, options for this options for that, and generally confuse people by what Emily offers. Instead - Emily produced three canvases, a small sign, one of each size of photo book (with the same photos in each) and had a small slideshow running on a screen. So it was really easy for people to understand what she offered.
I was up several nights running making some nice new print - brochures, contracts, price lists, etc. all produced in Pages (which is a joy to use and a Word-killer at least in this household), in Emily’s new typeface FS Albert and printed on high quality 160gsm recycled stock. I think that spending some time on copy-writing, proof-reading and getting your information design right is really important.
So the result was that we got to meet and talk to lots of (on the whole very friendly) prospective clients, many of whom decided to choose Emily, and the enquiries keep coming. We were quite shocked when relatively early on we were already having to say “sorry, that date is booked”, and “Yes - we’re already taking bookings for September 2009″.
We’re both really happy and I know that Emily is really looking forward to photographing some great weddings this next year.
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[...] the National Wedding Show at the NEC where photographers earn their bread and butter in bookings. Emily Quinton had a stand and Steve Gerrard, having been on the other side of the lens for a change, went to [...]