The best desserts I’ve ever had have been made by Kim. But you don’t just eat Kim’s desserts.
Her cakes, cupcakes, pastries, and muffins always come with rules: best served at x temperature, best if removed from refrigerator x minutes before cake cutting, best if consumed by y, best if eaten upside down after yoga but before lunch. And I follow every one of ‘em. Because when you have a master making you something, you go with it.
Instructions and restrictions designed to optimize client experiences speak of your passion.
And I’m all for ‘em. If Kim says your birthday cake will taste better at 6am, set your alarm and eat your cake at 6am! She lives and breathes desserts and wants you to have the absolute best experience you can with her baked goods.
So, what’s your birthday cake?
What’s the product or service you just won’t compromise on? Lawn-mowing service without landscaping services — the travesty! Tiny little 8×10″ canvases of your best portraits — no way! Make-up application without an eyebrow wax? No fucking way, dude.
Making clients wait to see their images instead of plopping their slideshow online ensures that they’ll see your work in its best light. Selling 11×14″ canvases and above ensures that your clients won’t have buyers’ remorse when they see how tiny an 8×10″ canvas looks on their walls. That eyebrow wax means that people will see your meticulous eyeliner application, not those hairy beasts that haven’t plucked since last January.
Sometimes you have to care enough to make rules.
In my case, it’s printer-friendly versions of my products. They don’t exist. Not because I don’t care what you want, darling reader. I care deeply, and even though you want to save your color ink cartridges…you deserve better.
You deserve to see the graphics and feel the design as you move through the words — without it, you have a text-only document and absolutely no sense of just how much I give a damn about your experience with what I’ve written.
You’re welcome to view my documents on your tablet, phone, laptop, or desktop computer — or to print them all out, full-stop awesome. But the in between? Nope. Don’t go messin’ with my birthday cake.
And now…I’m curious. What’s your birthday cake — what are the rules you’ve established to optimize client experiences in your business? Lemme know in the comments…
Mine, is you must fill out a form before we move another step further into the planning phase of your shoot. I must know who you are. It gives us both homework and gets her excited and involved in the process. Don’t want to fill out the form, fine, we weren’t meant to work together.
Love it!
I wonder if instead of a printer friendly version, you could just find a printer that would print it as a book if people wanted that. Obviously there would be some logistics to work out, but if I’m going to have the ‘experience’, I want to have it somewhere else other than sitting in front of my computer. Maybe the customer would get a code and then only one book could be ordered by the printer per code? Maybe using blurb.com?
More on the actual topic though, mine is having a fine art print of the photo before I will sell the digital file. Unless you are holding the fine art print, you’ll never know that Walmart turned your photo orange and not me, the photographer.
That’s one of mine as well! Actually, when you purchase high-res files (i.e. printing RIGHTS), it comes with a 420x297mm fine art print and instructions.
Am thinking of two – we don’t shoot without you having hired a professional make up artist (I’m shooting to help you career – you gotta want to be invested in the best promotional portraits available) – and – you gotta pay for the full, edited, picture – you don’t get digital copies of unedited proofs, you gotta purchase the edits as well since they’re what makes the image stand apart from the rest of the crowd.