I'm David Sheldrick,
the founder and
director of the business.
My name's Nicole Markhoff,
and I do branding and videos.
My name is Max.
I am the operations manager.
I'm Andy.
I am head of sales and marketing.
The Wimbledon studio,
which is where we are right now,
started about a year and a half ago.
This used to be
a pub called The Slug and Lettuce.
We built this studio from scratch,
with the walls and doors and paint
and all that sort of stuff.
You kind of bond when you do that sort of thing,
because I've never built a studio before
and I learned so many new things in terms of
woodwork, carpentry,
certain ways to do things.
I think there are elements of this
studio and our own careers that are tough to balance
because, obviously,
we contribute massively to the studio in
our own way,
obviously Max is the studio operations manager,
I do marketing and sales,
so the studio kind of relies on us
doing it, otherwise no one will do it,
but then we've got our own careers as well.
I also find
that the two feed each other,
as in the things you learn,
well, I learned
in the studio
inspires me to create new things.
Personally, for myself,
the one thing I really struggled with
when I was doing photography on my own
was finding a community
in which you could test your creativity,
experiment with new things.
Yeah, I guess it gets quite lonely
when you're on your own doing freelance work,
but when you're in a studio environment,
it's not just the people around you,
like Max or David and Nicole,
it's clients as well that come in,
and you build that rapport,
you build that chemistry,
build that relationship
and you find out about them as well,
and it opens our minds
and opens our vision of –
there's this whole new world
of photography out there
which we didn't even know of,
and we're learning that way as well.
When we're doing branding
or we're doing marketing,
we do everything in house.
Everyone is a content creator
so we can all
every day create some sort of asset.
And for me like an asset is already,
when you're shooting,
you put up a GoPro in the corner
and you're shooting a behind-the-scenes video
of you shooting.
And so maybe I'm shooting for a client,
but I can use that behind-the-scenes video
for PS Spaces on their
Instagram and promote the space.
So it's always like trying to be inventive.
How can I
squeeze as much as possible from this
one shoot
or this one hour I have here?
I think one of the most challenging parts of
starting the business and continuing
to grow the business is that
you almost have to be good at
loads of different things.
You have to be,
number one, just good at photography
and lighting,
but then
I had to learn how to build
an then, as Nicole said,
you then have to learn how to
build websites,
market yourself digitally as well,
create deals,
develop the business
so that
you have some kind of roadmap
in the future of like where you're going,
you know, maybe you want more studios
or maybe you want to
go into production more
or maybe you want to become more
of an agency.
You are not allowed to stop learning,
you have to keep on doing it.
I use Phase One because it's the best
photography camera in the world.
Nothing even comes close to it.
Counter-intuitively,
it actually is much more simple
to use than a lot of other cameras,
it just does photography
incredibly well.
Phase One ultimately also allows us to
take on loads of new business as well,
because there are lots of clients
who run their own companies
that actually really do care about
the quality of their marketing
and so, as long as you can really
somehow get that across to them,
most businesses
are happy to pay for it.
The quality is so much higher
that they can't really go and get it
anywhere else at that point,
and after you show them,
they find it very difficult
to go back to a previous quality.
You know it's going to be premium
when you shoot the product.
I mean, if you've got a team around
and you tether shoot, which we did today,
they look at the screen and they're blown away
because it has that 'wow' factor.