One of the most rewarding parts of my job is shooting photos for new stock. Choosing and buying stock is fun – we’re now good friends with a lot of people from companies we deal with and getting together at trade shows to discuss new ideas and the coming season is great – but once the stock arrives I get my own creative kick by working out the best way to display items; the best story to tell with them. While the business was young and growing, most of this was done in the shop, but over the years much of that has been passed on to the hard working team I have there. My time is now often spent trying to give our online customers the kind of experience we give our shop customers. My home office is always full of stock samples and the kitchen is regularly turned into a photo studio for the day.
Although many suppliers provide stock photos, I love to do our own lifestyle shots. It gives us a chance to take items from different suppliers and put them together and gives us a stock of unique images and ideas for people. I come from a creative family and my Dad is a great photographer, so often helps out. My little sister is an artist – if I can get hold of her, Alice makes the best stylist. For me, running a small business is all about the variety, but this is definitely one job I regret having to rush when we are busy. Producing online content is my chance to communicate with our customers, provide the chat about products our real world customers get, show them ideas we have seen and loved. That’s the best bit of running a real world shop, and it is also the best bit of running an online operation.
Below: I have always been a bit of a geek too – my latest fun thing to do is timelapse photography on my phone. Having had an interest in technology since I was young, I am amazed at what powerful little tools we carry around with us all the time now in the form of a mobile phone. High quality cameras, powerful computers connect to the endless knowledge available on the web. They can even speed up time, it seems.
And some of the resulting photographs for our Christmas section:
