We recently connected with Ryan Priest and have shared our conversation below.

Ryan, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?

Micro weddings and elopements are currently seeing the biggest trend in the wedding industry. Couples are looking to have a more intimate wedding experience where they can really focus on each other and choose what’s most important to them instead of feeling the pressure from the opinions of family and friends. The idea of eloping or having a micro wedding has really gained popularity in the last five years because couples have become more interested in combining a destination wedding with a honeymoon experience. It’s also a more cost-effective celebration to provide an intimate dinner rather than hosting a huge party with hundreds of guests. Many couples also do not want to be the center of attention at a large ceremony. They would prefer to read their personal and intimate vows to one another in private while standing on a golden sand beach or the summit of a mountain at sunset. The pandemic really helped propel elopements and micro weddings because it gave many couples an excuse to have a small wedding celebration instead of a large traditional wedding.

Ryan, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

One year after Corinne and I met on the Big Island of Hawaii, we decided to quit our 9-5 jobs and travel South America for a year. We both had an immense passion for travel, adventure, and learning about new cultures, so we knew this would be the perfect next adventure for us as a couple.

During our trip, we wanted to have a way to share everything we were experiencing so we created a website that detailed our travel tips, adventure stories, and volunteer opportunities in each country that we explored. During the process of creating this new website, we realized that we worked really well together and that combining our areas of strength (Corinne’s in writing and Ryan’s in photography) could yield some powerful results.

By blogging all of our experiences and sharing daily through social media, it also gave us an opportunity to enhance our photography skills by capturing candid moments of our experiences every single day.

When we finished our trip, we decided to move back to Hawai’i and start a business together where we could work together and fuse all of our passions. Shortly after having our intimate wedding in Kona with a handful guests and a sunrise adventure session the following day, we knew that we had to pursue our dream of merging our passions for adventure, marriage, and photography all together. It was in that moment that we decided to create a brand centered around adventure elopements in Hawai’i!

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

Corinne and I knew that taking beautiful photos wasn’t the most important aspect of our business. More importantly, it was providing an exceptional experience that went above and beyond all of our client’s expectations and our ability to assist with planning one of the best days of their lives. We spent our first year in business gaining as much experience as we could. When we were first starting out, we would often book sessions on the different islands for a very small profit so that we could gain as much experience as we could. During that first year, we would travel to the different islands, we cooked all of our meals on a camper stove, camped in tents before sunrise sessions, and scouted for hundreds of hours discovering our favorite locations across each island. Each time we would book a session on another island, we would stay for several more days (in addition to the one day we were shooting) to find more areas to photograph and we soon became location experts throughout Hawai’i.

We were very consistent with posting on social media by sharing photos, videos, and valuable information regarding many elopement topics that couples who recently became engaged were researching. Soon after growing our social media following, creating a new website with many blog posts highlighting all of couples who eloped with us, as well as sharing relevant information about eloping in Hawaii, we started to really see an uptick in inquiries. At the time, we were one of the few photography companies in Hawai’i that solely focused on booking eloping couples who wanted a wedding day filled with adventure! By choosing this unique niche and branding our entire website around elopements, our website was able to rank highly on Google for search results around this specific wedding topic.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

In 2020 (just two years after starting our photography business), Hawaii completely shut down and blocked all travel due to the pandemic. Tourists were not allowed to visit the islands from March 2020 until it reopened again in October 2020. That was an entire seven months where couples who had booked us were unable to visit the islands. We had more than 30 elopements booked for this time period. Instead of canceling all of the elopements we had booked, we decided to pivot. Once most states started to open back up, we emailed our eloping couples to ask if they wanted to get married on the mainland instead of rescheduling for the following year in Hawaii.

Because most of our couples were eloping and therefore had flexible travel plans, some of our couples decided to change their elopement location and get married out west. We flew to the mainland with our camping supplies and camera gear, picked up a rental car, and drove 13,000 miles across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, and Colorado. We spent all of our time each day location scouting for the couples who decided to reschedule their elopement with us on the mainland. We researched numerous locations via GoogleEarth and would arrive in each area a week ahead of time so that we could scout all of the trails before meeting each couple for their elopement. Most of our meals during this four month time period were cooked over a fire and we slept in our tent in campgrounds across the west.

This was definitely the most challenging hurdle that we’ve ever had to experience in our business; however, it really taught us how to pivot during times of adversity. It was one of the most spontaneous chapters of my entire life and I’m so grateful for sharing such an incredible experience with my wife and best friend. We couldn’t provide our couples the Hawaii elopement they were originally planning on, but we were able to create an unforgettable experience that they would remember as one of the best days of their lives.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://alohazoephotography.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alohazoephotography/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alohazoephotography/
• Other: TIKTOK: https://www.tiktok.com/@alohazoephotography?lang=en PINTEREST: https://www.pinterest.com/alohazoephotography/

Image Credits
Please credit www.alohazoephotography.com (our photography business website) for all images.