Albums

[keyntat]

Hi,

I am trying to change my wedding packages. I am thinking of offering 3 different packages, still trying to iron out price,time etc. However first I am going to choose the albums to offer. I have a vendor, they have so many to choose from.

My question is how many albums do you offer to clients? Do you give them a lot to choose from? Since I am going to have 3 packages should I offer 3-5 different albums?

How do you have them choose the color of the album, do you have swatches or a paper with the colors on them?

How many options do you give them for the amount of pages in the album?

Once I do decide which albums to offer, would you recommend having an example of each different one to show? That would be pretty heavy to carry since I don't have a studio, but I will if I have to : )


Thank you so much in advance

Nichole

 

[ryyback]

I think alot of wedding photographers are going the 'set fee' route. Meaning that they charge a certain amount for the wedding day with a cd/dvd of the photos and let the couple choose what they would like for wedding albums and prints, etc. Then they charge double or more per item ordered ( someone jump in if I am wrong?)
With so many ways to get prints done now-a-days, it seems like a pretty good idea really.

 

[dakkon76]

EDIT: Um, it's late... after reading your original question again, I realize that this response has absolutely nothing to do with what you asked... lol. Anyway, I loved the way these guys worked so I'll keep it in here anyway.

To at least contribute to your original question, they way they did things was they invited us over to their house and showed us 2 albums. They said they could use a number of different pages that would frame in our pictures, basically anything we'd like. We liked the quality of what we saw, we didn't need to see much at all and we were sold. We left not feeling overwhelmed, knowing that they did great work and that they'd include as many pictures in our album as we wanted. Theirs was a flat price per pic once we went beyond what was offered through the package.

---------------

This is how our wedding photographer worked. They charged a flat rate to shoot our wedding. They were there for about 4 or 5 hours and weren't rushed to get out of there because they only booked one event per day. They came VERY highly recommended and do absolutely no advertising at all - word of mouth keeps them extremely busy. We recommend them to everyone we know we were so impressed with the time they spent with us, as well as the quality of work we received!

In contrast, my sister just had her wedding and had a GREAT photographer. However, as soon as the cake was cut, he was out of there... not even an option to pay him more to stay because he'd already booked for later that day.

So, while the first example could have charged more to stay past X amount of time, they didn't... and they had nowhere to go... and they end up with a stellar reputation that keeps them busy without having to advertise

The other guy, who is more "professional" had fewer shots for them to choose from, wasn't nearly as friendly and felt "rushed" the entire time he was there... refused to stay longer... and not only will he not get a reference from us or my sister, but instead we actually "stay away from this guy"

IMO, the money you lose for staying a couple extra hours will come back to you in the end.

Oh, and another thing they did that was great... we booked them 6 months in advance and it worked out great... they took us out and spent an hour with us and took some engagement photos. We ended up with about 6 pictures to choose from that we could order more of (for an added cost, which was brilliant on their part), or that we could just keep to run one of them in the paper. Just the shoot and the 6 pics were included in the cost, so anything extra we would have chosen would have been gravy for them, and it was a small extra that was easy for them to do that set them way above anyone else we talked with.

 

[niccig]

The way I do it is to offer albums in different price ranges - currently I offer AsukaBook, GraphiStudio and KISS wedding books. I'm just getting started, so I haven't ordered all my sample albums yet, but I plan to order one of each. I'm a person who likes to see what I'm buying before I buy it, so I don't expect my clients to do otherwise.

Asuka, at least, has brochures you can purchase that explain the different book styles, page coatings, etc. Graphi is the tricky one, since they have all kinds of covers. They do send a (free) sample kit when you become a customer, but I don't know what exactly is in it, since I haven't received mine yet.

For pages, my price list includes the cost of 20, 30 and 40 side albums. When I do the pre-design, I choose the number of pages that I feel are needed to best tell their wedding day story (usually 40). They can then add or cut from there.

 

[niccig]

This is sort of an old thread, but I thought I'd update in case anyone cares. I got my Graphi sample, and it is OUTSTANDING. It included a 4x5 minibook with stock images, a 6x8 book filled w/Graphi propaganda (including pictures of the different covers), a 9x13.5 50page album with transparent cover and all the different paper types (same stock layout as the 4x5) and a leather briefcase. I was absolutely astounded! Even the bubble wrap on this thing was super high-quality! Now that I've seen one in person, this is going to be what I recommend to all couples.

I think I'm going to also change my pricing breakdown a bit. Right now it's a long list (prices for each size/number of pages), so I think I'll change it to $xx/page for Asuka, $xx/page for Graphi, $xx amount to upgrade to the leather cover, etc.