02. The Truth About Why I Left The Wedding Industry
APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | GOOGLE podcasts
Thank you guys so much for being here! This is a very exciting launch for me, I’ve been kind of scheming on this for a couple of months now and I’m just happy this is going out into the world. So, if you listened to the first episode, you heard a little bit about my backstory as a wedding photographer and how I sort of transitioned out of that industry. Today, I wanted to talk about the why behind why I left the wedding industry. It was not what you think it is, where I was like “oh I don’t like doing this anymore and I’m just gonna find something new” and it was this magical pivot.
But no, it was not. It was not what I originally planned to do by any means. Let’s back up a bit to 2018.
Getting Started in the Wedding Industry
In 2018 I quit my full-time job and around that same time I signed up to advertise on two major wedding advertising platforms, kind of under the assumption this was going to help me grow my business and get clients. And that is exactly what happened. I started booking immediately, and a lot.
The first year that I was doing weddings full-time, I think I shot 30 weddings, and the second year I shot 25. Things were going well but I was using these advertising sites as such a heavy crutch that my business didn’t really have a foundation on its own. All of my inquiries for the most part were coming from these sites and just to put it bluntly, I wasn’t a good marketer. I also have lots of thoughts on these sites from both the bride's perspective and the vendor's perspective. I will definitely create a separate episode about that but ya. I was basically just using them as a crutch, I wasn’t really doing any marketing work on my own, and was thinking that being just an okay photographer was going to be enough for me to have six-figure years and be booked out all of the time and that was not reality at all. It was unrealistic to expect that and it’s my own fault for not putting more time and energy into my marketing efforts, instead of styled shoots and workshops.
Gaining Experience & Pricing Myself
In 2019 I invested a lot of money into two things. One was a group coaching program that was probably $4,500 or so. The second was a luxury wedding photography workshop in Paris. This workshop was incredible; we stayed in a chateau in the wine country of Paris, it was basically a luxury vacation with some really nice styled shoots mixed in. The education that was provided was amazing; we got a sales course and we got courses from publishers to share how you can get your weddings and your work published. It was an amazing time and I do not regret spending that money at all.
Around that time, I was priced for budget weddings, I was not anywhere near the pricing I should have been for clients who were booking $100,000 weddings. I think this, first of all, caused some confusion with my potential audience because here I was shooting on film and shooting these glorious scenes in Paris and the workshops and whatever were intentional and very styled, but my pricing just did not match my work at all. But because of my poor marketing ability, I couldn’t just raise my prices to $5,000 and $10,000. It just wasn’t going to work like that because I didn’t have the jobs to back it up, I didn’t have steady growth, and I just wasn’t doing things right. At the time, I didn’t really know I was doing it wrong and I will say, because of where I’m at now, I don’t regret doing what I did. I really wasn’t strategic at all.
Luxury Wedding Photography & Raising My Prices
At the same time in early 2019, I was planning my own wedding and house hunting and doing all of this personal stuff that is taking up all of my mental capacity. I basically stopped booking. I increased my pricing on these wedding websites and what I noticed with these sites is that there’s a sweet spot. Brides that are looking for vendors on these websites are typically in the one to two-dollar sign range on these sites. They’re not looking for brutally expensive vendors, that’s not how luxury wedding photographers get work.
Luxury wedding photographers get jobs through wedding planners and through referrals, they’re not coming through advertising sites. So anyways, I leave these workshops with these ideas in my head that if I just crank my pricing up to $5,000 on all of these sites, I’m going to get all of these luxury weddings and that was not reality. The brides that are looking on these sites are not shopping in that price range, that’s just how their target audience works and just how it is.
At this point, all of my bookings dropped off. I wasn’t getting any inquiries. The inquiries I was getting weren’t converting. My business literally just took a shit but because I was so busy with personal things that were going on, I was kind of just like “well, this is just how it is” and I was really upset about it. It was heartbreaking to see this business that I thought I was doing so well at, completely fail. Luckily, I started building up this network of lifestyle and branding clients and had this whole other brand I was working on and at that point, I sort of switched them over.
Making the Switch from Wedding to Lifestyle & Brand Photography
I had primarily been running Hannah Michelle Photography as a wedding photography business and was running Hannah Lozano Photography as a lifestyle and branding photography business. They had separate websites, they had separate everything, and I slowly started using the Hannah Lozano Instagram more and eventually just completely retired from weddings.
It was really good timing because, in 2020, COVID happens and I saw so many of my vendor friends struggle to reschedule 25-30 weddings that they booked for that year that ended up taking a whole other year of their life without any extra income and it was just a disaster. It was so bad to watch. I had only two or three weddings that year and a couple moved from that year to the following year, but I think I ended up shooting two weddings in 2020 and two in 2021 and that was it. I retired officially from wedding photography.
I didn’t want to come into this episode just bashing the wedding industry saying how bad it was, how much I didn’t like it, because some of the clients I had during that time in my business are amazing. Some of them are my closest friends and were just such great business connections.
Emily from Amavi Studio did my branding and my website and everything for my recent re-brand (and on all of my branding for that matter). We’ve been working together non-stop and I only know her because I shot her wedding. So it wasn’t all bad. It wasn’t the wedding industry’s fault that I wasn’t running a business the way I should have.
Creating a Successful Business
One thing about lifestyle and branding photography is that I didn’t have this advertising site, which is a separate conversation, to rely on. It truly became strategy and SEO, social media marketing, word of mouth referrals, and all of that stuff combined together to create a successful business.
Now in this interesting period where I built this whole thing from scratch and had this business back in Atlanta that was basically running my life still. Part of what I didn’t love about the wedding industry was that I didn’t have weekends. And that’s kind of where the name of this podcast came from. I didn’t have this schedule that everyone in my life had. It was isolating and it was hard but once I transitioned over to lifestyle and branding photography I was still shooting on the weekends and there were often 10-15 day stints that I had at least one shoot every day. It was just non-stop.
Finding the Joy in Having Time Off
I get out to California and suddenly I have very little work. I am doing some product projects but I’m not anywhere near where I was busy when I was back in Atlanta. Part of what I’m trying to do now is finding the beauty in not working so much. I see this meme all the time that’s like “I didn’t want to work a 9-5 anymore so I started my own business and now I work 24/7” and that is just the truest thing I’ve ever heard in a meme, ever.
It’s really hard to set boundaries and create your structure and not work literally 24/7. It’s something I’m trying to take with me into this new chapter of life because while right now, there isn’t work for me to be doing 24/7, I’m also trying to not let that stress me out. I’m trying to take it a day at a time and actually enjoy having time off and go outside, walking to a new neighborhood, going shopping somewhere new, going to the park with my dog, meeting new people, all of these things I didn’t get to do back home because I was working so much. If that means for a little while, making less money, I think that’s okay. There’s a lot to working societally, especially for business owners and within the business owner industry, to make a certain amount of money or you’re not successful and truthfully, I bought into that for a long time and I still like separating myself from that.
I talk about this with my therapist all the time that my value does not come from how much money I make and I think a lot of business owners have trouble with that because there are so much less quantitative and qualitative ways to judge success when it’s just you. Back at 9-5s, you get performance reviews, you get a salary, you get a pay raise when you do well and get bonuses, and all of these things we don’t get anymore because we are the whole company. The money comes when it comes and it doesn’t when it doesn’t.
This kind of got off on a little bit of a tangent but basically, leaving the wedding industry was definitely the right thing for me but it wasn’t the wedding industry’s fault. I will say that I’m in a much better place now that I have left it but that’s more so because I have found a little bit more balance and I don’t think you have to completely abandon what you’re doing and jump ship in on a whole industry just to find that balance. I think it just takes a little bit of time and work.
Follow me on Instagram at @hannahlozanophoto where you can find everything about me, get to know my photography, ask questions, and send in ideas for episodes. If there’s anyone you’d like to hear on the podcast, let me know, I am all ears!
