Brand Photography For A Jewellery Business - Kodes Interview
How important do you think photography is?
Photography is KEY for a jewellery business. It shows the scale of the items and how it sits on someones' chest or neck - something extremely important for brands online (one of my main tips when it comes to SEO and e-commerce websites!), to eliminate doubts and questions before purchase. For Kodes it was also the main vehicle to raise Kodes' brand profile.
I was hand painting wooden jewellery as well as creating silicone jewellery, working with not-so-premium jewellery materials, often perceived as colourful and fun - but in 2019 I introduced more premium acrylic pieces and decided to raise Kodes' brand to be more elegant. The injoke with Diana is that my models can never smile (as I was trying as much as possible to stay away from being perceived as FUN)...but we relax after a bit and the smiles start coming in!
My effort to raise the brand profile was also part of my challenge to change the perception we have of acrylic - fun and bright - it's possible to have more elegant and sophisticated acrylic jewellery!
Diana is to the day meeting and exceeding my brief and producing outstanding photos!
Not only do I now have beautiful photos for social media, clear photos that communicate the size and scale of each item, but Diana's photos helped me get accepted into Not On The High Street after trying for 5 years!
You have a home studio but also hire a pro (me!), what are the benefits of learning to do your own photography and when is it time to hire someone?
When you're a small brand like me, hiring a photographer to shoot your collection is a huge investment and you might not be able to afford that for every collection, every item, every year! I would say model photos are always best done by professionals, as much as it would be great to rope in your friends or model yourself. A bad model photograph is really going to impact your brand.
But when you like me you are a small brand but think like a big brand and create 100+ unique products a year, you have to compromise and try and learn some of the photography yourself (which will never be as perfect as the professionals'). OR it's very useful to have your own set up when you are releasing products bit by bit throughout the year as it's not cost-effective to pay for a half-day shoot for a couple of products every few months.
If you have a product that is hard to shoot (in my case shiny shiny acrylic like Diana calls it!) you want to leave it to the professionals!
Do you have plans for 2022?
I have released 100+ products in 2021 and now it's time to tell the whole world about it! I plan to contact lots of shops and hopefully get some PR features too. When you are a small brand like me, you're the designer, the maker, the PR person and the saleswoman!
What's your favourite part of running your own biz?
Creating anything I want! Two of my latest products were born from a guided visualisation - both me and a friend who helps me on Kodes attended the session and when asked to remove something from the garden we were in, we both removed a fountain! And when asked to keep one thing from the garden we both kept a semi precious stone!
We never talked before hand and obviously neither during the meditation session, so when we talked about what we visualised individually we couldn't believe it and I decided to create an Art Deco inspired fountain pair of earrings and to add some semi precious stones to some of the designs.
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