We were lucky to catch up with Andrea & Aaron Miller recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Andrea & Aaron, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.
Our passion and focus is to truly get to know the clients that we serve. Many people in the wedding industry will show up on the day and their client will be complete strangers to them. Larger studios hire associates to film and edit wedding films for their brand without ever knowing the couple. When we arrive we want to know their favorite restaurant, honeymoon plans, and job aspirations. Beyond that, we want to be an advocate for them on their day, a shoulder to lean on if things don’t go as planned, and most importantly, somebody to cheer them on throughout the day. We intentionally limit the number of clients that we have each year so we have the time to invest in them. The industry standard is to book as many clients as possible and edit videos as quickly as possible. This will never be our business structure because we feel it’s necessary that we are the ones that personally get to know our couple, are behind the camera on the wedding day, and then craft the film. We feel all of these steps are integral in creating a truly personal and unique story.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
By The Millers is a wedding videography business and we got our start in 2019 initially as a pipe dream and now the business fully supports our family. Through mentorship and couples who trusted us, we were able to grow quickly and find our target audience. Clients of By The Millers are couples who want their unique story celebrated through stunning visuals and personal dialogue. They appreciate the creative aspects of storytelling and value how the small details are knit together to create a cinematic and personal experience. It’s been powerful to see how our product has been able to communicate and attract the couples that want exactly this. We are really proud that the time invested is seen and valued by our couples. The relationships that we get to build throughout the process have been the most rewarding part of building this business and makes every day feel fresh and exciting!
What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?
The best source of new clients has been the connections that we have made within our industry. We’ve had the pleasure of working with countless talented photographers, coordinators, florists, makeup artists, venue owners, and many more wedding vendors. When you spend an entire day working alongside these people, it’s almost impossible to not build a relationship with them. An important mindset that we have learned to have is that the various vendors we come in contact with are partners and resources to us, not competition or hinderance. We’ve even come to see our direct competitors as fellow creatives and have fostered relationships that have provided countless opportunities because of this. Within any industry, building genuine relationships is paramount to growth and success.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
In our unique situation, we were forced into our partnership by marriage. We are a husband and wife team that met in college. We got married right after we graduated and both joined the corporate world. If you told us that in 6 years this would be our career, we’d likely think you were crazy. Less than 3 years into the corporate world, Aaron grew increasingly frustrated with his job and was fatigued from consistently denying his creative passions and dreams. I (Andrea) pushed him to quit his job and pursue these dreams which led him to launching By The Millers while I worked full time and helped on the side. We grew so rapidly that I took a smaller, less demanding job to invest more into the business, but within six months we realized that there were still not enough hours in a day to keep up with the business’ growth. We are both extremely fortunate to do this full time and have very contrasting, yet complimentary skills that make it seamless working together as partners.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.bythemillers.co
- Instagram: @bythemillers
- Facebook: @bythemillers
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.
com/c/AaronMillerMedia
Image Credits
Angela Nobles
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