We were lucky to catch up with Isabelle Dervaux recently and have shared our conversation below.

Isabelle, for folks who may not have read about you before, can you please tell our readers about yourself, how you got into your industry / business / discipline / craft etc., what type of products/services/creative works you provide, what problems you solve for your clients and/or what you think sets you apart from others. What are you most proud of and what are the main things you want potential clients/followers/fans to know about you/your brand/your work/ etc.
I am a personal photo curator and organizer. I work with families to bring order and meaning to thousands of print and digital photos they have taken and accumulated over the years.

I guide them through choosing their most meaningful photos and shape them into beautiful printed albums, slide shows and videos that uniquely tell their family’s story.

Tell us the story of how you came up with the idea for your creative services business?  Paint the picture for us so we really understand the context, circumstances, the emotions etc.  Walk us through how you knew this was a worthwhile endeavor – talk to us about the logic of why you felt you could succeed?
We had just moved back to the East Coast from San Francisco. I got tired of dragging beat-up boxes of wedding and family photos and children’s artwork from one home to the next, back and forth, coast to coast. I’d always wanted to organize the family history buried in those boxes, but as the number of photos grew, so did the fear of tackling the growing size of the task. At the same time, the number of digital photos we were taking started to explode. I felt the anxiety and guilt of not paying enough attention to our pictures and thought other people must feel the same way.

Around the same time, working as an illustrator had become less rewarding. I was looking for something different that used the visual talents I had developed over the years. Since I took the plunge and decided I could help other busy parents overwhelmed by the number of photos they produce every year.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
My mission is to teach busy parents how to take charge of the photos they accumulate and eliminate the unnecessary stress they can cause. When I coach parents to take fewer and better pictures, their relationship with photography evolves from frenetic bursts of photos to a thoughtful framing of the experience, letting them appreciate the moment while recording it for the future.

For digital photos, I focus on teaching, coaching, and mentoring. I specialize in working in the Apple ecosystem because I use this daily. We start with shaping a chaotic photo library with strategy and a deeper understanding of how the app works. Families might have started to clean up here and there but have yet to make real progress. We create a system together that they can follow every year while having fun along the way. Then, can we move on to creating projects. 

It’s all worth it when they tell me they take fewer and better photos after we work together. They now know how to be mindful and evaluate their images with confidence. 

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?
Initially, I left my business cards on the bulletin board of my children’s pediatrician, who has multiple offices around NYC. I was able to reach the moms who take gazillions of pictures of their kids every day on their iPhones—precisely the kind of mom I love to coach. Speaking and being featured in the press was a big help later on. I got mentioned in The Wall Street Journal after a journalist saw that I was giving a talk at her public library on New York’s Upper West Side. That article introduced me to clients outside the city.

Then, I was surprised to get an email from The New Yorker asking to be interviewed for The Talk of the Town. I had worked for the magazine as an illustrator in the past, but being interviewed by writer Lauren Collins and having illustrator João Fazenda draw me was definitely special. Because these publications have a very broad readership, I got to work with many families on the West Coast and Europe via Zoom that I wouldn’t have ever been able to connect with otherwise. 

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