We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Emily Pottiger. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Emily below.

Alright, Emily thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

Tom & I (Emily) offer both photography and videography services for our couples on their wedding day. Tom and I were both freelancing in 2018 occasionally shooting wedding videos where Tom would lead and I (Emily) would second shoot with him. We noticed while serving our couples, that the photography and video teams were not working together. Often time the photo team would take the couple away for a separate portrait session or just generally keep us out of the loop. We knew our couples deserved better and needed a team that could work seamlessly alongside each other. Our goal is to always be #teamcouple and put the capture of their memories above our own portfolio and ego. Since we saw the need, we decided to take the leap and begin our own business focusing on offering both photography and videography for weddings full time. Since we’ve started, we’ve been hired for over 120 services between photography and video.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

We’re Tom & Emily Pottiger. We’re a husband and wife wedding photo and video team, here to capture the unending joy, belly laughs, and happy tears that make your big day uniquely yours.

Tom found his love for video at a young age. What began as making silly videos with his friends turned into a passion. He started working for churches to create videos, but after filming his first wedding for a friend, he knew this was the right direction for me.

Emily started her post-undergrad life working a 9-5 and constantly feeling drained, she needed a way out. Tom had started booking more wedding video jobs and as she started second shooting for him, she immediately knew she was in love with the wedding industry.

We believe that photos and videos are forever, meant to be placed in beautiful frames and hung on walls, or watched on repeat as you think back on the feelings and emotions of your wedding. We wholeheartedly support real moments, golden hour light highlighting your “did we just get married?” smiles, and simple, quiet reflections as you take in your whirlwind day. And when the ordinary becomes routine, we know that catching a glimpse of your wedding photo out of the corner of your eye will be the perfect reminder of your story and love for each other, no matter what life throws your way.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

My business partner just happens to be my husband, Tom, who is the ‘Tom’ of ‘Tom & Em Weddings.’ We met during our junior year of high school through mutual friends from our church. We were both from separate states but met at a college visit while scoping out Emily’s future university. We’ve stayed together for the last 10 years and have been married for 4 years.

Being married and working alongside your spouse has it’s challenges. We’ve come a long way since we first started our business. We had to learn the hard way how to work together effectively and respect each others artistic direction on the wedding day. We are both creating difference mediums of art for our clients and neither person or medium is more important than the other. As time has gone on, we’ve gotten so much better at working together and consider our wedding days to be seamless as we work with our individual strengths in mind.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

We love getting to know our clients during the process of booking and engagement season that leads up to our couples’ wedding days. We have a few channels of communication with our clients while including educational content and casual conversations. Once they’re officially booked, we send them a large Planning Guide PDF that includes educational content on what to expect from us and on their wedding day. There is so much work that goes into planning a wedding as well as specific terms in the wedding industry that many couples don’t know or understand. We put together this guide to educate our couples and let them know we are a resource during their planning process.

As well as our emails, we engage in casual interactions including over social media platforms. We encourage all of our couples to follow us on Instagram and join our private facebook group. After our engagement session with our couples we tend to get to know each other a bit and follow along with each others lives on instagram. We love posting Instagram Reels that showcase our goofy personalities which always really resonates with our clients. Posting our true selves online is the ultimate form of brand loyalty for us. Even after the wedding day, our clients keep up with our accounts and send us messages all the time. We love that our services are so personal and we get to continue personal relationships with our couples for years to come.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.tomandemweddings.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/tomandemweddings
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tomandemweddings
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@tomemweddings3536

Image Credits
Tom and Em Weddings