We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Camara “Kumar” Thomas a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Camara “Kumar”, thanks for joining us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

The original starting point for our business was high volume school portrait photography. And yes, I mean the pictures you take in school every year that sometimes are either on point or terrible. Industry standards is the one picture of one pose; with hardly any variation throughout your school years. We have decided to offer 3 pictures with 3 poses to give parents a few more in my opinion needed options. This would not only increase our sales for us but encourage parents that take the time out to dress their children for picture day because they would actually be able to see the whole outfit. Not just the top of the shirt.

Camara “Kumar”, 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?

Adorn Productions is a minority-owned portrait photography and videography studio based in Cleveland, OH, dedicated to providing customer experience-focused photography and video production sessions. Our nurturing, collaborative, and creative space allows us to capture the most genuine expressions, empowering our clients to showcase their authentic selves. Unlike conventional studios we desire to be more of a media partner with our clients, creatives, and their audiences. We believe by providing a nurturing, collaborative, and creative space we can capture the best expressions. By shifting the focus to expressions and the customer experience we feel as though we empower our clients to showcase their authentic selves.

We typically have two main customers, our high volume customers and our boutique customers. These customers usually have two very different sets of needs and requirements for their sessions. The high volume customers typically would like to get a lot of something done in a very short period of time. So this is perfect for your schools, corporate offices or even real estate companies. For instance, real estate companies would use this service to provide new listing photos and media for their new or upcoming properties to hit the market or to provide their their agents and office staff with updated headshots. Now for our boutique clientele, they usually like to customize their packages to absolutely benefit their needs, which may mean some days they want to create a lot of behind-the-scenes content so they can use it later for social media, or they may want you to create social media/ marketing content during an event. One of the things that we are really proud of is that we work with brands and nonprofit specifically to help grow and tell their stories through several different media platforms. One of my shiny examples is that we have worked with nonprofits to host summer camps podcast youth summits and so much more.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I’m going to be absolutely frank the school portrait photography business is a very hard space to get into because it hasn’t had to change in over 85 years. The main company that covers this industry is Life Touch and they have been taking photos since I was a kid. So they have hammered out all the the issues that could possibly happen in a Portrait session for them. So when they approach schools to potentially take on their schools for upcoming school portraits their brand holds a lot of weight and they are considered the gold standard in the industry for whom all others are to be compared too. This has made it incredibly difficult for us to find a way into the system and earn the trust of larger schools. The reality for us in this industry is that if we don’t take on large enough schools, we don’t make any money. Especially since the goal is never to forward not to forward all the costs onto the parents to try and cover the cost of operations . This would make photo packages go from thirty to sixty dollars to eighty to a hundred dollars. Realistically no parent is paying that much for school pictures unless they have a large family and everybody wants a photo. Some of the things that we have done in order to differentiate in the industry and take on as many schools that we have is offer more options to parents with the three pictures three pose style, offer media partnership packages to schools, and get creative with finding corporate sponsors for our lower income schools. Our media partnership packages offer a quarterly retainer option for schools to be able to have high-quality media video or photo coverage for school events, graduations, and school picture days. And now with a recent rise of social media administrations have started to request help with their social media platforms. So over the years we have had to stay fluid with our offerings too our clients in order to even stay in the market. However, the state, despite this, we are still an up-and-coming brand in a market where people are hesitant and resistant to change.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

So I think the main thing that helped us establish ourselves in the market is that we have always been active in the community. So when we first got started out, we would just continue to attend the events we already were going to and offer services for free or severely discounted rates. This gave us a great opportunity to start the foundations of the brand and give people a taste of our work. From here we started to make strategic partnerships with nonprofits that specifically worked with groups or in industries that we thought would pair well with us. So for instance, we started to work with nonprofits that work with youth in varying degrees to show schools that we can work with kids And achieve great results. Eventually, these partnerships transitioned Into more opportunities for paid work, and since we already had established so many connections, it was easier to work with businesses and brands..

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Adornpro.com
• Instagram: @_Adornpro

Image Credits

Adorn Productions LLC and Camara “Kumar” Thomas