How a business is born...

Putting together a photography business is probably easier than putting together other businesses - especially when you've already done it before but it can still be pretty laborious so I thought I'd share a little of the process of putting this one together.

When we decided to move from Texas I was sure I was done with professional photography. I was feeling burnt out and ready for a change. I think having a baby is a huge part of that. Marisa and I had talked about getting our studious together in the past but now I was done. After I moved in, I left for a reunion in Idaho. While I was there my sister in law was showing me portraits she had had taken and they were so cute. And then my friend Tyan started to really get into her photography and she was getting really good at it. And I started to feel the itch. Sometime around the 5th of July I called Marisa. I had had a change of heart and told her I wanted to do a business together - she was immediately on board and we started talking about the style we wanted and all that stuff. We knew a name would be really important so we spent the next ten days going back and forth about names. We thought of "m studio" since we're both "m" names but it seemed too stuffy. My parents suggested "phabulous photography" but that seemed a little too cheesy. After a few days we actually settled on:

lolo photography

We liked that for 2 or 3 days but then Marisa'a husband said he didn't see anything special about it and we agreed so we went back to the drawing boards. I looked up every single word for sisters/twins/best friends/etc. in every language and came up with pretty much nothing. I poured over mythologies from all over the world trying to find something that rang true to our style/personalities. I was truly exhausted of the process when finally one night I gave up and climbed into bed after midnight. I couldn't sleep as I tossed all sorts of names around in my head. I started thinking about what Marisa and I were like growing up and tried to think if there were any famous characters that were like us, "Betty Boop? No. Annie? No.......GIDGET! Yes!" Gidget is a tomboy who wants to do everything the boys do but at the same time she's always dreamily thinking about the boys...sound familiar? And right when I thought of Gidget "Moondoggie" came into my head. (If you've seen the old Gidget movie you might remember that Gidget was obsessed with a hot surfer who went by "moondoggie" . Throughout the movie Gidget is always sighing and saying, "Oh moondoggie...") And I knew I was in love with the name. I woke Michael up and told him the name and he sleepily said, "Ya, that's great." Though he didn't remember that the next morning. I still couldn't sleep so I went downstairs and googled it and saw that there were a few little companies like moondoggie coffee and what not but pretty much nothing bad out there. I was totally excited and hurriedly texted the name to Marisa and went to bed.

Marisa wasn't immediately taken by the name until she had some time to run it over in her brain. I explained that I thought it was fun, funky, playful, and totally memorable. I thought our work would fit right with all of that. She agreed and then we moved on to our logo. This is our first incarnation:
I like the font helvetica and I think it's cool and modern so we agreed on this for a while. But then there was the subject of what colors so we went over these choices....


We stayed with the pink and grey but then I started to yearn for more and thought maybe a different font...so we thought about changing it from one to another:
You might not see the difference between the two but the second seemed more youthful. But still after a couple days I was getting a little bored of this so I emailed this idea to Marisa:


Ugh! What a mess! Neither one of us liked this too much but it got our wheels turning...

No, not this....

And then this:

I loved it and Marisa did too except she wasn't too hot on the colors. We wanted it to be fun but vintage looking so we tried some other combos:Marisa liked them all and I liked none of them. We played around a little more and decided we liked the combo of pink and yellow. It seemed too poppy still so we distressed it a little and ended up here:
And thus we have a logo.

It then has taken weeks to get our site up and running. You wouldn't believe how long it takes to write bios/details/price lists/etc. but it seems to be finally wrapping up. So now we're up and running.

I am actually really glad I changed my mind about doing photography. I think all the difference has been giving up doing what I don't enjoy and only doing the style I want to. And it helps immensely to share the stress with Marisa. Thank goodness I got unlimited minutes when I moved up here because we have been on the phone 24/7. In the past when Marisa and I talked about doing a business together I was always a little apprehensive that if we did it would ruin our friendship. She didn't agree and I am glad she didn't because it's actually been great. We are just different enough to have our strengths and weaknesses compliment one another. We've done a few sessions together so far and it has been a blast. I can't wait to see how these next several months go....

Wish us luck!