We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Shelby Ring a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Shelby, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

My journey behind the camera started in front of it. I was a model first, and then upon going through a divorce, I found myself cooking on sailboats. I was so proud of the life I’d made for myself and I wanted to remember it — so I grabbed and outdated GoPro, jumped in the Caribbean waters we sailed, and began filming the beautiful sealife beneath the surface. I began documenting the places we sailed and the next thing I knew, I started getting paid to do that for other sailing yachts. The rest is history!

Shelby, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We are a creative video studio that specializes in helping brands tell their stories. I have a soft spot in my heart for female-founded and female, centered businesses. Going through a divorce and leaving a very controlling religious culture at a young age, I’m very passionate about supporting women in developing financial independence. Our brand’s motto is to tell stories worth telling, we are passionate about inspiring people, not only through video but also through lifestyle how to live their biggest most expansive version of the life that’s in their heart to live.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

The biggest thing I wish I had done earlier in my business is to empower talented contractors and pay full price for great work. For the first five years of my business, I would do a lot of in-house training, and I would take people fresh out of college and train them up to what I knew… When I finally realized if I pay top dollar for top talent, and not only gives me an amazing product to work with…but also I’m constantly learning new things on sets. Invest in hiring top talent – even if it stretches you because the caliber of service will elevate you, your portfolio, and your projects so much faster. Invest in top talent for your team!

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

One of my favorite marketing stories would be the time I took a risk in launching our podcast. I had wanted to launch a podcast for years and years; our current content marketing team was absolutely stacked in 2019, and we were doing tons of blog article writing and press releases, but I’ve had a gut feeling that launching a podcast would be worth the investment. My entire creative team went against it because we didn’t have additional bandwidth to take on that marketing platform, but I chose to do it anyway, and I took the responsibility of production with one other camera operator. We shot our first season in three weeks, and we recorded nineteen hours of episodes. It was a huge labor of love, but my end goal was to build a platform so that we could have two quality hours with sought-after people in our business community, and we could be of service to them. I found that when we opened up our resources to lift our colleagues up, that always came back around, be in the form of referrals for business, ending up producing their brand campaign, or some other introduction. The podcast and human-to-human contact was the greatest marketing move we ever made as a company.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.rubyriotcreatives.com
• Instagram: @rubyriotcreatives
• Facebook: facebook.com/rubyriotcreatives
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/shelbyring/
• Youtube: youtube.com/rubyriotcreatives
• Other: Quick Bio: Shelby Ring is the chief cat herder at Ruby Riot Creatives; a digital content marketing firm specializing in brand photography and video production based out of Austin, Texas and Charleston, South Carolina that specializes in video production, SEO content marketing and branding strategy. When Shelby’s not filming or geeking out on Google Analytics, you might find her teaching Buti yoga, stuffing her face with oysters, or chronicling her recent personal travels on her passion project blog, Travels With Shelby.

Image Credits
Photo Credits: @RubyRiotCreatives