Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to RJ Marchese Tomisina Lynn . We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi RJ & Tomi, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about how you identified some of your key partners/vendors and how you made those relationships work?
RJ – So the answer to this is two-fold in that each of us found the other and we became partners but we also needed actual partners to work with as far as our main customer base which is conventions. So while I’ve been working with The Variant since 2015, I didn’t actually start running it until mid 2016. At the time I was going through photographers like water because what the actual job entailed wasn’t what some of them believed it to be, myself included.
When I met Tomisina in 2017, her audition was to do media for Fayetteville Comic Con in Fayetteville, NC. I gave her very limited instructions on what I wanted and left her to her own devices. She nailed it cold. A month later we had a business meeting where I invited her to become the Photography Director of The Variant and the rest as they say is history. So when I say this question is two-fold it’s because while we had to find each other as partners, we work with conventions and have to partner with them to do the incredible things we do. While some convention owners are absolutely AMAZING (Alan, Keith, Mark, Brad) some still see cosplay and cosplay photography as just an afterthought to their conventions. Especially at comic book conventions, there’s this old school belief that cosplayers don’t buy anything at conventions. Paraphrasing, the claims are that they “take up space and stand in front of people’s booths blocking them from potential customers and are more or less useless.” So right off the bat I would like to dispel this fallacy 100%. I run a booth that has cosplayers in it. They literally inundate the booth with their boxes and bags and purchases at EVERY CON WE ATTEND. They definitely love to shop at cons!!! Also since we run our photo booth at most conventions we attend, the cosplayers that come to the photo booth for photos 99.9% of the time need a place to put their purchased wares while we take their pictures. We literally set up a chair at every con in the booth for the cosplayers to put their bags or whatever.
Sorry, tangent. Anyway, point being, some con owners just don’t get the symbiotic relationship between their conventions and the cosplayers that attend them. Those cons we generally have stopped or just don’t work with and are usually people looking at their con as a quick cash grab and not a labor of love. The trick is finding out why exactly the convention owners do what they do and then working with them to not only fit the needs of the convention but to also fit the needs of a customer base who may or may not actually be relevant in the eyes of the conventions. Either way we love what we do and at least 99% of the cons we work with love what we do. The other 1% might come around and they might not but with The Variant as a partner, they honestly don’t have to because we endear ourselves to their customers. We make their conventions shine!
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourselves and how you got to where you are today to our readers?
RJ – So The Variant started in October 2015 as a basic idea that someone came to me with where they wanted to take photos of cosplayers and wanted me to write some articles. I am a published comics writer so my foot in the door to conventions was just blossoming and I was getting to know a lot of players in that community. I had also previously been a cosplayer that out of nowhere went viral so my foot was starting to be planted firmly in the doors of both the comics and cosplay communities. So for a while I was just writing articles and doing social media copy for The Variant. So while we started in 2015 I actually took over as the editor in chief of The Variant in 2016 and things really didn’t start rolling until I invited Tomisina to be our Photography Director in 2018. At the time, Tomi was a 15 year veteran on the photography side of things with her day job being a senior photographer at a multi-million dollar photography company as well as moonlighting as both a photographer and a cosplayer at a well-known local princess party group.
Once she took over the photography side of things, our format of what we did changed from just taking photos of conventions and cosplayers at cons to having a photo booth setup that would provide free cosplay photography to any attendee of any con we work. We provide every convention with media as well. We promote the conventions we do before, during and after each event.
Tomi – So I’m just gonna say it, RJ is a promotional machine on social media. He posts multiple times daily on all of our platforms and has made deals with all of the cons we attend to provide them a service of not only free professional photography for all of their attendees, but free media and free marketing. He recently started doing the statistics of what we do to provide to the conventions we work with and the numbers are staggering. For one convention back in September we literally had a potential customer reach of 8.4 million. Our follower count is only 17k. The difference between those numbers is INSANE. I would definitely advise any convention that wants to work with us to contact us because we really do make your convention into an event that the cosplayers love and that the owners can be proud of. I’m so proud of what we do and we have the potential to make any con shine brighter than ever.
RJ – Also, that’s just our convention offerings. This year we’re planning on diving into cosplayer character appearances. We do local nerdy events and markets. We’re even looking into the possibility of opening a studio. Our monthly Cosplay Spotlight is hands down our longest running feature and one of the most popular things we do. Every month we showcase a local cosplayer that embodies talent, creativity and most importantly, a positive voice within the cosplay community. I personally take an extreme amount of pride in that feature as we have never missed a month doing it and I make sure I have my hands in almost every aspect of it from choosing the cosplayers, to scheduling, facilitating and attending their photo shoots all the way down to editing some of the photos myself and making custom watermarks for each and every one of our “Cosplay Spotlights”.
Once someone has been a part of that feature, we then offer them opportunities to work with us at any convention we attend and provide them con passes to do so. We provide them with prints of their cosplays that they can sell at the cons and they get to keep 100% of the money they make. At the larger conventions we do they all have opportunities to make money but at those it’s more of an all-hands-on-deck, “we’re working this weekend” kind of deal. At those cons we literally work our asses off but at the same time we all band together to just do the best we can do. We work hard and then we play hard. I love everyone on our internal team. They all stepped up and helped make this what it is today and they earned every bit of the rewards that come from that.
Tomi – Agree 100%.
How’d you meet your business partner?
Tomisina – So in 2017 RJ reached out to me to cover a fairly large convention and I did a lot of event coverage and was just coming off a particularly large event so I got my crew together and went and did the thing. I just did what I would normally do and he was extremely impressed. We were talking at the convention and he mentioned that they had done a photo booth at a previous convention and it got my mind working because I had also done a photo booth at some previous cons which had not been great experiences. We discussed it further and decided to try the idea. That December he also came up with a great idea for our monthly Cosplay Spotlight feature where we had some cosplayers dress in their cosplays but we shot them in my garage in front of a green screen and made the background a Christmas tree setup so it looked like the cosplayers were the “toys” under the tree. It was a great concept and when we were done, the finished product looked incredible. The ideas he comes up with, still to this day, constantly amaze me!!
That January we kept throwing ideas back and forth and eventually had a business meeting where he invited me to be the Photography Director. I was intrigued that he was pretty much giving me carte blanche to do whatever I wanted and once we started down that road it just steamrolled. Our popularity at conventions grew and we put together an incredible team of people that helped us grow in ways neither of us even remotely imagined.
Now after five years it’s been an incredible roller coaster ride that I’m in no way interested in getting off of. Our team has killed it and in 2022 we’ve had some serious game changing moments. I’m excited to see what the future holds for us and can’t wait to make 2023 as amazing as the past five years have been and definitely more so.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
RJ – So not even gonna lie, our reputation was not stellar before 2018. With a constant turn around of photographers along with some social media drama thrown in, The Variant was struggling. Once our photography team was finalized and put in place along with recruiting some key cosplayers to be advocates for us, business definitely took a turn in the right direction. The real answer to this question can be summed up in one word though: Team. Just this past June we did an extremely large out of state convention that was definitely like nothing we had ever encountered since we started doing this. Our team rolled with every punch. It was successful beyond belief and that success was due to every member of that team stepping up and killing it. That one convention showed everyone on the team exactly how important they all were to the success of this thing and I can honestly say it made believers out of all of us. We went to that con in Ohio and a second one a few months later in Pennsylvania and in our opinion we endeared ourselves to both of those markets. We met a ton of outstanding people and the amount of positive feedback was so overwhelming we couldn’t even remotely keep track of it all.
That success allowed us to take a step back from what we would normally do at our local conventions and modify it a bit to maximize what we do to the furthest potential we could. It gave us a chance to become not just a photo booth at conventions, but an actual event that the conventions could be proud of and that the attendees love. Our fans have been just the most outstanding and we love every single one of them!!!
Tomi – At one point during the con in Pennsylvania RJ and I took a break. We walked out of the photo booth and watched as our team took the reins and just did it. We sat there in astonishment and I just looked at him and said, “we made this”. In that one shining moment, the hashtag we use on all of our posts #WeAreTheVariant could never have been validated more. And make no mistake, when I said “We made this” it was not just about RJ and I, it was about everyone standing in that room. It was about every one of our people that comes to cons with us, or does photo shoots for us or works at the booth or advocates for us. It’s about every cosplayer that comes to us wanting to take pictures or just following or Liking our social media. It’s about every convention owner gracious enough to give us some booth space to do what we do.
Indeed, WE are The Variant.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.the-variant.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_variant_
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/variantcovers
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-variant
- Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/the_variant_
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/thevariant
- Other: TikTok – https://www.tiktok.com/@the_variant Hive – @wearethevariant
Image Credits
Wolverine – @weaponx_cosplay – RJ Marchese
Blair – @blackkarmacosplay – Tomisina Lynn Photography
Deadpool – @Johnie_5 – Tomisina Lynn Photography
Gang Orca – @thisWolfieNips – RJ Marchese
Evelynn – @AwkwardTurtleCosplay – Jon V Photography
Scarlet Witch – @DommieDommer – Greenfield Photography
Lady Death – @AgentCrushCreative – Fox Dream Photography
Twi’Lek Bounty Hunter – @Fyreheart_Cosplay – Greenfield Photography