Today's Guest: Bill Michelin of The Album Designer Network in Deerfield, Illinois
Today's Host: John Bentley
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Bill Michelin Expert PageANNOUNCER: This VTalk Radio Photography Spotlight is brought to you by morephotos.com bring photographers to the web to sell, display, and proof images since 1998. Welcome to the VTalk Radio Photographer Spotlight with your host, John Bentley.
JOHN: Today we are in the studio with Bill Michelin, President of Album Designer Network of Deerfield, Illinois. Welcome, Bill, to VTalk Radio's Photography Spotlight.
BILL: John, thank you very much and I appreciate you having me on.
JOHN: Well tell us a little bit about the Album Designer Network.
BILL: Well when we created the Album Designer Network, we were looking for a program that would really help the photographer because all the complications that have come into the world with the, really the digital field. There are so many options that photographers had that it actually created a more of a work flow for them to where they were putting more hours into the studio behind the computer as well as behind the camera. So we actually came up with a interactive online ordering system and image submission system which is connected with multiple binderies, national binderies across the country as well as professional labs. And with our system the customer can actually go on and see the album which they are ordering, see the pricing they are ordering, as well as pick up the inscriptions and the attributes of the product and they can order from multiple binderies at the same time within one order. Then they can upload the images to us once our designers have actually completed the preliminary design the customer has an automated email that is sent to him. They click on that link which connects them with a page that's dedicated to their studio under their studio name where they see a virtual album. They can flip through the album and review the album with their clients. They can put revisions under each page of the album for our designers to see and once they're done, they can submit it, and then we would create the revisions and put it up again and then they can approve it, and it goes to print. Once the photographer has completed his revisions, he actually can go into a control panel that shows all the steps of the process to when he submitted the album to when it went to color correction to when it was designed, and he can press a revision button which submits the revisions once the revisions are seen by out designers, they go ahead and fix the revisions and put it back up online. Then the customer can go back and do his control panel, hit the approve button, and at that point, the images are sent to the lab for printing. Once the images come back, or the prints come back to us, we quality control check them for color, for any damages from shipping, we fill out the forms for the individual binders that they're going to, and we'll ship them off. The binders drop ship the final product directly to the customer.
JOHN: Well that certainly makes the whole process easy for the professional photographer.
BILL: Well it definitely takes all the work flow away from them, and the thing that we have found is that photographers are spending anywhere from 10 to 30 hours designing a customer's album, because they don't have a graphic artist background. They're used to being photographers. So really, you know, instead of eating their meals behind the computer and designing albums, that's the main thing is that we take the design away from them, and we give them back a quality design that is done by professional graphic artists.
JOHN: There's certainly one thing that makes your company unique and different from other album companies is that you're dealing with a number of different companies that your professional photographer can chose what company they use for perhaps binding or perhaps the custom design. That's certainly a unique option that gives a lot more control to the photographer, doesn't it?
BILL: Yes it's, we're actually the only company that by hooking up with these national well known binderies and labs, the thing that makes it so special is that it's the same price that the customer would pay if they were to go to these binderies directly. So they not only have a choice of the different style of books they can carry in their studio and present to their client, but it gives them the ability to again, pick and chose what style of album they want to sell their client, or have their client pick out, and they're not being penalized or not getting a jacked up price for it. So really, we've created a work flow situation that really gives them a choice of what products they want to sell their clients and what kind of designs they also want to present to their clients.
JOHN: Ok, if a professional photographer would be interested in your services, where would they find you on the internet and do you have a contact phone number they could reach you?
BILL: Yes, they can find us on the internet at www.theadn.com and our telephone number...we have a toll free number which is (877) 317-1202.
JOHN: Now we're going to take a break here right now, Bill, but before I let you go, would you give your website address and contact information for our listening audience.
JOHN: We are speaking with Bill Michelin, President of the Album Designer Network of Deerfield, Illinois, and you're listening to VTalk Radio's Photography Spotlight. We're going to step aside for these important messages, do stay tuned.
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ANNOUNCER: We now return you to the VTalk Radio's Photography Spotlight with your host, John Bentley.
JOHN: We are in the studio with Bill Michelin, President of the Album Designer Network of Deerfield, Illinois, and you're listening to VTalk Radio's Photography Spotlight. I want to thank you for coming out on the program, Bill. Welcome back.
BILL: Thanks, John.
JOHN: Let's talk a little bit about you. When did the Album Designer Network start? How did you get this idea? Where did this all come from? What's your background?
BILL: Well, I was actually a professional photographer for 15 years with my studio doing wedding and portraits. About 1998, I actually got into the digital work flow scanning medium format negatives, doing work for corporations and private individuals. About that time, I sold my studio and actually developed a template program for designing wedding albums or event albums that worked in Photoshop, I believe, it was one of the first four template programs that originally came out. We sold that and actually distributed it through a company called General Products which is an album company located in Chicago. We distributed nationally under the name, Digital Vision Collection, and what we found out during that three year period toward the end of the span is that because of the name of our template company called Album Designer was that many people came up to us at trade shows and said, "Album Designer" so you guys design albums? I'd say, no we make templates for you to design albums. We found out reaction was we don't' want to design albums anymore, we want somebody to do it for us. And that's really where the Album Designer Network came into it's beginning and that's when I really thought of a solution for photographers to be able to take all their work flow of post album production and give it all to us and still have a choice of what vendors that they use, and we actually chose vendors that created hand made albums the old fashion way, but there were flush albums that were very tasteful and some had a more of an old fashion look to it, and some were a little bit contemporary, but we wanted to put album companies on our site that really gave our customers our choice of a full spectrum of different looks and feels.
JOHN: Let's talk about some of the design options that are available. You had three categories listed on your website, classic, innovative, and fine art. Can you give us a little description of each kind of...
BILL: I will tell you that most of our customers come to us for our innovative and fine art designs. Our designers are professional graphic artists who are not part time students or college students, they've actually graduated college with majors in fine art, and they've had over 3 years experience in the work force working with Photoshop. So they are ultra qualified for coming up with original designs. My philosophy of designs are when any page that is turned to in the book, you should be able to look at an image first or you should see an image first and not some technological advancement. You know, we don't use anything like film strips or cheesy designs and really what happens with our designs is our creative director stores every single job that comes in and depending upon the type of design it is the artist will then go ahead in her mind, visualize what she wants to see on the page and then go ahead and make it happen in Photoshop. So we really don't use templates, and it's not a cookie cutter type situation. Every single album that we do is an original creation. The innovative design is just what I had mentioned, and when we go to the fine art design, then we start using things that are a little bit more out of the box, in other words, they come almost like 3 dimensional to where if a bride and groom are walking down the isle, her train might be coming out of the actual inset of the picture. Her bouquet might be, if she's like flinging it off to the side, you know, we don't want to center it and make the image smaller so we actually make her arm and the bouquet come out of that particular inset on the page. We'll take images for backgrounds and blend them together so that they almost appear as one. When you come down to the classic design, the one reason we created that, and that is a very basic looking design, and we realize that a lot of our clients have customers that don't want to pay a certain upgrade fee because of their budget, but they have photography for their wedding so we created the classic design which is a templated look design which is a very basic design much like how our original program was created. The difference is our use of images and how we use them in the backgrounds so that, again, they come out very professional looking, but at an economical cost.
JOHN: Now you state on your website that you will greatly reduce a photographer's production time, reduce turn around time, and increase profits. How are you going to achieve these goals?
BILL: Well as far as the production time, in talking to many of the photographers that we deal with and we mostly deal with established photographers that do 20 or more weddings a year, a lot of these photographers that have gotten into Photoshop, you know, and we've talked to them that they're spending, you know, 20 to 30 hours or more designing an album. Where our artists, if they're doing a fine art album it might take them a day a day and a half depending on how many images that they're working with. Plus the photographer really isn't able to create a fine art album, because of, you know, they're not graphic artists, but if you compare it to an innovative album or classic album, classic album might take a photographer 10 hours to do, or it takes our designers 2 - 3 hours to do an innovative. It might take our designers 4, 5, or 6 hours depending on how many images; a photographer might spend 20 hours, 30 hours, but not achieve the same results. The other thing that we do is that we actually help our photographers take these new designs which help them to create a niche in their own community or among their competition to where they have a design that when a customer or one of their clients look at one of their designs, they've never seen anything like it before. And because of that, they now created that special niche in their marketplace that allows them to charge more for that upgrade. The client may want to go with that type of album, and we actually help them adjust their marketing and adjust their pricing so that there is a reasonable upgrade scale that makes it advantageous for the client to go for that type of album without risking any of the previous types of products that the photographer has to offer to their clients. So we've helped them increase their profits by anywhere from $1,000 on up, and it's proven to be very successful and it's helped us to develop very good relationships with our clients to where they really look to us for advice at this point.
JOHN: So you actually help them with marketing and selling and pricing of their products then?
BILL: Absolutely.
JOHN: Great. Now another question that I want to throw at you before I let you go is, what about care and cleaning of these albums? What should a customer do?
BILL: Well, because all of our albums are hand made and all the pages are lacquered, as far as on top of the prints, there really isn't a lot of care that's needed. You know the only care that really comes into play is if they have a 4 year old, 9 year old kid that takes a pen to the album, and in that case, any of our vendors would be more than happy to take the album back and go ahead and professionally take care of that problem, but as far as, you know, any type of wear and tear over the years, any of these albums are really lifetime guaranteed under normal use and there's really not any type of special care that's needed except to keep it out of direct sunlight. That's really about it.
JOHN: Ok. Now before we end the program, Bill, would you kindly give our listening audience your website and contact information again.
BILL: Sure the website, again, is www.theadn.com. Our toll free number is (877) 317-1202.
JOHN: We've been speaking with Bill Michelin, president of Album Designer Network of Deerfield, Illinois. I want to thank you for joining us today, Bill, on VTalk Radio's Photography Spotlight.
BILL: John, it was a pleasure, and I appreciate you looking into our company, and we realize it's a special program for photographers that provide special products for their clients.
JOHN: Well it's good to have experts that we can bring on to the program. Thanks again, Bill.
BILL: Thank you, John.
JOHN: I want to thank everybody for listening in today on VTalk Radio's Photography Spotlight. John Bentley signing off. Have a great day.
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