039: Image Salon – The Taboo Of Outsourcing & How It Could Change Your Life

August 30, 2021

“Don’t try and compare yourself to others.”

VICTORIA DIMAANO

Hey everyone! It’s Sally here, from Studio Ninja. Today’s episode is all about Victoria from Image Salon!

Victoria is the CEO of Image Salon, an editing, retouching and photo studio based in Montreal, Canada. It was founded in 2014 with the core value of placing people first and offering a tailored editing and retouching services for its clients as well as a high touch Customer Service.
Victoria found her calling and passion in management pretty early in her career. Prior to joining the Image Salon team in 2016, Victoria grew and managed several photography studios, first across Canada, and then internationally aboard cruise ships. She has also worked as a Wedding and Portrait photographer, both  including to some destinations such as Australia, the Philippines, Bahamas and Lebanon. In her free time, she enjoys spontaneous road trips, long-distance biking, and hosting dinner parties.
With a strong interest in streamlining workflows for photographers and team members alike, Victoria’s embrace of exploring new and innovative technologies and methods has and continues to help Image Salon grow and continuously improve all it has to offer. She has a bright and forward thinking pedagogical approach and between her experience in Leadership and the trust she has placed in her team means Image Salon can keep pushing business forward for both clients and her team.

Check out some of the biggest points from Victoria’s interview below:

  • Victoria’s journey in the Photography Industry
  • How Victoria started out at Image Salon

  • The onboarding process with Image Salon

  • The Taboo surrounding outsourcing

  • The different options available

  • What happens if you don’t have a set style of preset?

  • The one thing Victoria would do differently if she could start her career all over again
  • The freedom that is associated with outsouricng

  • How to work with Image Salon

  • Why outsourcing is healthy for your business!

Can you walk us through the client journey at Image Salon?

There’s different ways to go about it. We do have an onboarding process where it’s a guided conversation. It’s learning what the current edits look like, what they like with their editing, what they would like to improve.

We look at sample images. It could be your own images and it can also be somebody else’s images, the direction towards which you want to go. The guided conversation is to know if they’re happy with it, first of all, because of our expertise, we’re able to evolve that style, if needed. Then we do, after those initial questions, we do live editing to make sure that the preferences are down and to see if we’re aligned before assigning to, usually before assigning to an editor. The photographer is paired up with one of our editors, which is great because they get to build that relationship. I always see outsourcing as a collaboration if we want it to be successful. A lot of communication, like any successful relationship.

I think that’s key. Yeah. The main onboarding processes is a technical conversation, I would say. So it’s great.

It’s a mix of both, depending on the volume that the client sent in. We have either a single editor or a team of editors. Depending on the turnaround times that they need and the volume, especially. Clients that send in 30, 50 weddings a year, we’re most likely going to assign them a team of editors.

Are there new things in your sights now that you’ve stepped into the role as CEO? What can we expect?

We’re going to keep on evolving. I think the last 18 months have been challenging with the whole industry. We’ve managed to navigate the team towards opening up. What’s to come? I’m excited to say that just this week, actually we’d launched PHAiTO, which is our AI powered editing service.

I’m so happy to talk about this because it’s another level of service. Obviously, we talked about profiles and having an assigned editor, but for maybe photographers who would just want the proofs out or get the base edits out, we have a 500 image trial right now, which you can try out the service. We’ve worked really hard and actually, we took the time during the pandemic to develop this with our tech partners. It’s been, we just launched it yesterday. It’s brand new, but it’s exciting and I think this is where Image Salon will eventually evolve, just bringing in new technology to help out while still keeping, the essence of Image Salon has always been tailoring, customising the approach for each client and billing. We talked a lot about that relationship. I think it’s going to stay, it’s the essence of who we are. We’re branching out to different levels of service so that, for different kinds of photographers who don’t necessarily want to talk to somebody or exchange or give feedback. I think it’s a great way to start with the edits.

If you could add one final piece of advice, something that’s made a difference in your personal life or your business life, what would that piece of advice be?

Don’t try and compare yourself to others. I think that’s the biggest thing that I’ve applied to myself and that I usually give to others. Especially in our industry, there’s so many presets, there’s so many types of photography. We tend to compare ourselves and try different things. It’s great to try different things, but I think keeping your head to the paper, hustling the way that you do, and then trying to hone in onto your own style. I think it’s more rewarding than trying to emulate what’s out there. Trends, and then as a business, we try to always stay ahead of the trends, but I think it’s, trends come and go. It’s important to keep at it the way that you feel good doing your job as a photographer. Yeah. That would be it.

Thank you!

Thanks again to you all for joining us and a huge thanks to Victoria for joining us on the show!

If you have any suggestions, comments or questions about this episode, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post, and if you liked the episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post!

That’s it for me this week, I hope you all enjoyed this episode.

See you soon,

Sally

About Victoria Dimaano

With a strong interest in streamlining workflows for photographers and team members alike, Victoria’s embrace of exploring new and innovative technologies and methods has and continues to help Image Salon grow and continuously improve all it has to offer. She has a bright and forward thinking pedagogical approach and between her experience in Leadership and the trust she has placed in her team means Image Salon can keep pushing business forward for both clients and her team.