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

Alright, Miranda thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

We began Harmonie House Images in July 2022 to provide brand photography services to local, women-owned small businesses in and around the city of Charlotte, NC.

From the beginning, we wanted our work to be more than just new brand photos and updated headshots. We wanted to serve our clients by singing their praises and promoting their businesses, and we wanted to find a way to stand out in our saturated market. The best way we knew how to do that was to be truly interested in them as fellow business owners, women and neighbors.

We spend weeks getting to know our clients and their businesses, collaborating with them to create detailed, personalized shoots tailored to their specific branding needs. Once we get to shoot day, it feels like we’re all girlfriends hanging out and having fun while doing a ton of good work together.

After the photographs and videos have been delivered, our work has only just begun. We continue the relationship with client spotlight features on social media, how-to guides for utilizing their new image library, and frequent check-ins just to see how they’re doing in life. We personally love gifts, so for our business, client gifts are a must! We want the women we serve to know we value them, and we truly want them to succeed – because their work matters.

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

Great questions here! I feel like I covered a lot in my first answer, but to give a little more background, I began photographing families and children in 2010 as a creative outlet on the weekends. Over the years, I added interiors and product photography, but didn’t feel like I had direction or purpose in what I was doing. I just knew I loved working with my camera and with people.

During the summer of 2020, my dear friend Lori Ellen and I were on a hike talking about our careers and what we wanted to differently. She’d spent a few years doing real estate photography as a side hustle while also continuing her day job of 18+ years as a licensed speech-language pathologist. At one point in the hike we both looked at each other and commented that we should really think about doing photography work together. We didn’t have it fully fleshed out yet, but we knew we wanted to brainstorm and think about ways we could potentially serve our friends who owned small businesses.

The thing I’m most proud of in our business is that, from the beginning, we knew we didn’t want this to be about us. The heart behind what we do is to serve our clients to the very best of our abilities, to promote their work, and to help them connect with their clients. We thought by creating a great customer experience before shoot day, as well as a fun and well-planned branding session that produces beautiful brand photography and videography, that we would help give our clients the launch or refresh they would need to gain more traction and clients. What we didn’t see coming was some of the clients we were attracting were also wanting more direction with their branding as a whole – a more cohesive social media presence, a website refresh, and even full branding and logo services.

Interestingly, some of our first clients were women who owned these types of businesses. So we’ve been given this beautiful full-circle type opportunity to pull in our past clients that specialize in these areas and connect them to our current and future clients as a way to continue to serve all of them.

How’d you meet your business partner?

Lori Ellen and I first met at an evening small group through our church. It was being hosted in the home of our now mutual friend, but at the time, both Lori Ellen and myself were fairly new to the church and didn’t know many people. It was a rainy night, and I was wearing very loud knee socks under my boots, which she noticed after I took my boots off at the door. We connected again sometime later while singing on our church’s worship team and realized we were digging each other’s harmonies. Ten years and a lot of life lived later, we knew we wanted to incorporate “harmony” into our business name, both as a nod to how we first met, and to how we wanted our business to work in harmony with our clients.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

Instagram is our current source for new leads. We’ve been diligent to post content 3 times a week, and we make sure to keep posts within our brand colors and style. Our goals for posting are to encourage, entertain, promote other clients, and help future clients learn more about how we can serve them. We toggle between keeping it light, fun and informative!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.harmoniehouseimages.com
• Instagram: @harmoniehouseimages

Image Credits
Julia Fay Photography Carrie Allen