Jennifer Yeh and Jennifer Tsay
Now that Back to School season is underway, the holidays will be here before we know it. As crazy as that sounds, Christmas is just about four months away—so it’s the perfect time to take holiday photos for cards. That’s why we are thrilled to partner with Shoott, a female-run company that is making professional photography more accessible to everyone. Shoott offers “Insta-worthy” 30-minute outdoor photo sessions at local parks and other popular spots with vetted professional photographers—right in your area. “Our sessions are free to book and allow customers to pay only for photos they love at $15 per photo or less. We’re able to provide quality at this price point because of how we work with our photographers,” explains Shoott CEO and co-founder Jennifer Tsay.
Shoott works with photographers to book back-to-back sessions and give intros to new clients, while handling marketing and sales. “It’s our priority to make sure our photographers are fairly compensated and we provide a generous commission on all gallery sales, a minimum guarantee of $100/hour, flexible scheduling built around photographers’ schedules, and transparent and regular bimonthly paychecks,” says Tsay.
Now in over 600 locations nationwide, Shoott is growing under the leadership of Tsay (aka “Jen T) and her partner, COO Jennifer Yeh (aka “Jen Y”). The pair met freshman year at Cornell University. Today, they’re building a brand that increased revenue from $807K in 2019 to $4.4MM in 2020—despite the pandemic. We asked this dynamic duo to share their story with The Local Moms Network, including Jen Y’s experience as a working mom.
Want to try Shoott? Go to shoott.com and USE LOCALMOMS for 15 percent off.
- Plan out each day (including meetings, driving time, rest time, etc.). I don’t always follow the plant to a T, but sketching out the day helps me visualize how much time I actually have and what I can reasonably expect out of myself.
- Set and communicate your boundaries.
- Ask for help (I often hire my sitter to help drive my kids to things if I can’t move my schedule around to accommodate).
- Establish simple traditions with the kids so that you make you sure you’re making quality time with them and so that they have something predictable they can look forward to (e.g. we do brunch every Sunday at their favorite restaurant).
- Be proactive in learning new things and leveling up your skills, whether they be technical or relational. Not only does taking charge of personal and professional growth yourself help you be better, it also helps you do things quicker and more efficiently – which then translates into more time for yourself and/or for your kids!
Shoott has a strong commitment to charity. Can you please share a bit about that?
Jennifer T: Once some charities started reaching out for partnering opportunities with us, we realized that our business model could be easily tweaked for giving back! We’ve made the process SUPER easy for folks to earn money quickly for their charity or organization of choice and also provided a solution to partner with folks if they wanted to invite our service to provide sessions at events of their choice. For more info: https://shoott.com/giving-back
What are the biggest reasons moms should check out Shoott?
- We’re totally risk-free to try! Because we have no session fee, you can wait until you see your gallery to only purchase the photos you want! So you get to put our service to the test and see if we can indeed deliver what we promise 🙂
- We’ve done all the heavy lifting and research of finding the right photographer and the right location. All of our photographers and locations have been carefully curated and vetted.
- We only accept 2% of all photographer applicants. We screen the photographers for you for technical photography skills (can they give you those Insta-worthy family shots?!) and a great personality (can they make everyone in your family comfortable so your unique relationships shine through photos – even and especially your little ones?) We also background check every photographer out of an abundance of caution for our clients!
- We only need 30 minutes. The 30 minute duration is perfect for kids (and oftentimes spouses!) – it’s a great way to also burn off energy while capturing memories at each specific stage of their development.
- We are incredibly affordable at $15/photo and we also offer packages at $120 for 10 photos or $240 for your entire gallery.
- You are supporting a photographer from your local community that is also being compensated fairly from our company – they are guaranteed pay at $100/shooting hour and earn commission and tips and other incentives for working with Shoott!
What’s next for Shoott?
Jennifer T: As a startup, figuring out how to scale and be around for the long run is top of our list of priorities! We know we have an amazing service – how can we make it better and bring it to more people?
We want to introduce more offerings and features to give our clients a better experience including on-demand re-editing and retouching, more printing solutions, and partnerships for hair/makeup/clothing. We’re also trying to give more flexibility and features to our photographers to make sure they continue to be really happy using our platform to work with clients!
Location-wise, we want to keep expanding throughout the U.S. where we can find gifted, dedicated photographers and then move on to Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and beyond! Anywhere there are photographers and people who want photographs, we want to be the top-of-mind brand when folks are looking for beautiful and affordable outdoor photo sessions!
This story is sponsored by Shoott.