Kirk Russell, 3Lenses.com

The photographic industry is in the midst of a serious growth crisis. Even before the housing crisis, recession, and market crash, studios were booking fewer appointments, and clients seemed to be more price-sensitive.

Old-school solutions such as advertising more promotions or new flavor-of-the-month fads such as displaying images on boutique, graphic-enhanced web site and brochures, or using pretty delivery boxes won’t attract people who find most of today’s portrait studios outdated, unresponsive, and over-priced.

There is a parallel between today’s photo industry and the current housing market and auto industry. Luckily, we can learn from them and consequently avoid a similar fate.

Here’s the comparisons:

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Have you ever wondered what the status of one of your orders was at 3am?

In the upper right corner of our website is a link to our order status page. Log in, and you can view:

• Orders This Year
• Orders Last Year
• All In Process Orders
• All Completed Orders
• All Orders

All orders are sorted by most recent first, so you can easily see the orders in the lab. This makes it easy for you to learn if orders are ready or what the total charge will be.  You can also quickly generate reports like, “how much did I spent at the lab last year?”

If you don’t know your password, send an email with your studio name and ID to heidi@jdlab.com.

A decade ago, getting your name and phone number in front of customers was simple. You put one ad in the yellow pages and one in the local newspaper.

Those days are over.

Today, over 80% of your customers will look for you online before they call. In order to make sure they can find you, below is a checklist of places your business needs to be registered so customers can find you online.

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