We were lucky to catch up with Amber Genuske & Cassandra Klepac Red Riding Hood Productions recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Amber Genuske & Cassandra Klepac thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

Our mission statement is: “Red Riding Hood Productions is a new kind of full-service creative company that specializes in enviable video and photo production.

By creating custom-tailored roadmaps we’re able to craft soulful stories from abstract narratives, forge ahead by bringing conceptual ideas into fruition, and tease out the central force that is the animating soul behind every brand.

Empathetic business practices, communication styles, and collaborations are at the core of everything we do.

We marinade it all into a functional mix of fun and flow, because even work is an adventure, if you’re doing it right.

You’ve worked hard to build your brand/company. We promise to work equally hard to honor it.”

When we started Red Riding Hood Productions, we knew we had an opportunity to be a part of the positive change in production — from being on set to creating intentional content, to communicating with clients, and everything else in between. The driving force for the positive change in our eyes is empathy, taking ourselves seriously but not too seriously, creating beautiful work, and taking care of our holistic health.

And, we walk the walk – taking days off when we need a break, encouraging our contractors and crewmembers to do the same, and forging connections with everyone along the way through thoughtful and real dialogue.

Working and living this way is paramount to our business thriving.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

We’re Red Riding Hood Productions, a new kind of full-service creative agency and production house based in Austin, Texas. We create 360-degree campaigns, UGC campaigns, top to bottom creative productions, commercial photoshoots, and more. We specialize in video and photo content for brands looking to invest in their image, companies that give a sh*t, and badasses who live to push boundaries.

Meaning, good people who want to make the world a little better, who understand the power of creating a genuine connection, and who can’t resist the call of the wild.

We have a team of incredible crew members from hair and makeup artists to gaffers to editors and everyone in between. We are good people who like to work with good people. We believe in building people up, collaboration, and empathy.

We pride ourselves on being a “new” kind of production and creative company. We embrace the evolution of content, branding, advertising, messaging, platforms, and imagery – we don’t get caught up in the traditional ways of doing things because, as we all know it, everything is rapidly changing, every single day. We are open, collaborative, and over-commutative. You could say that’s one of our secret ingredients.

We craft successful ads by staying current on what’s working for marketing and converting customers, doing deep dives into trends within industries, all while building classic visual narratives that can stand the test of time.

We take pride in never following a formula and knowing that not one size fits all. By creating custom-tailored roadmaps, we understand each brand’s animating soul and tease out that central force in everything we create.

No toxic positivity here, though. We’re realistic about where we need to improve, while being gracious with mistakes, and doing deep dives into how we can constructively grow and get better, bigger, and badder.

Is there a mission driving your creative journey?

Overall, newness is what drives our creative journey. We both have a thirst for travel, experiences, and meeting people, and all of this serves as a major source of inspiration.

Luckily, we have the opportunity to do all of this through the work we do and pursue it individually, so it’s a self-feeding cycle of newness and inspiration.

And all of this comes back to our core mission as well – empathy and connection, teasing out the soul in brands we work with, and throwing out tradition for evolution and growth.

We know that the word “storytelling” gets overused, but all of this helps us be really good at storytelling, which is ultimately at the core of creating ads, content, and visual narratives. Being able to relate to new people, places, and experiences is not only incredibly gratifying, but it helps us better relate to the audiences we’re creating for.

Creativity is a journey, and it’s also a practice, and it’s something you can always get better at. Not being afraid of newness will help your creativity grow. We’re sure of it.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

There are so many! But one that immediately popped out to us is unlearning the “lack mindset” and shifting into an “abundance mindset.”

We were both freelancers for a long time and being a solopreneur is hard and honestly really scary. We both definitely got caught up in the #hustleculture and integral to that culture is constantly fighting for the next big project and paycheck and #bossgirl status. We’re not knocking this era down, though, because we believe that our culture as a whole needed to go through that for women business owners to have access to equal opportunities and thrive.

However, we’re thankfully ushering in an era of self-care, work-life balance, a focus on holistic health, and an understanding that there is enough work to go around.

We now understand that what is meant for us is for us – the bids we get passed up on, are not ours to be had; the projects that don’t feel right for us, are not ours to be had.

We used to take pretty much every project that came our way because we were just starting out, wanting to build our portfolio, and had the lack mentality of “what if” another project doesn’t come. Again, we’re not docking that era, because it takes trials and errors, and many “right” and “wrong” projects and clients to learn that lesson.

Now, we understand that an abundance mindset steers us towards projects and clients that align with our ethos. We manifest the business (and life, and health, and wealth!) that we want, but we also actively work towards it.

True manifestation only works when you put the action behind it. Unlearning the lack mindset and learning the abundance mindset only works when you’re willing to say “no” to opportunities that don’t align.

It is challenging, but it works and it is so worth it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://redridinghoodproductions.co/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/redridinghoodproductions/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/redridinghoodco