Reimagining How Parents Shop for School Photos and Yearbooks, with Captura

The traditional world of school photography is undergoing a remarkable transformation, blending time-honored practices with cutting-edge technology and data-driven marketing approaches. In this revealing conversation, Tim McCain, Chief Evangelist of Captura, and Michelle Federschneider, VP of Commerce, take us behind the scenes of this evolution.

McCain shares the fascinating journey of unifying multiple photography platforms (ImageQuix, PhotoLynx, Skylab, and others) into Captura's comprehensive solution. "It's like a big marriage of different families with different ways of thinking," he explains, detailing both the challenges and benefits of creating a unified approach to school photography technology.

The conversation takes a particularly interesting turn when Federschneider, who brings a fresh perspective from her 17 years at Vistaprint, reveals how data-driven marketing is revolutionizing parent engagement. Through rigorous testing and parent feedback studies, she's discovered counterintuitive insights about what actually drives purchases. "80% of our traffic comes from mobile," she explains, "so messaging needs to be punchy and to the point." Her approach has transformed traditional marketing assumptions in the industry, showing how simplified messaging often outperforms elaborate designs.

Yearbooks emerge as a compelling opportunity for photographers who are already capturing school images but missing out on additional revenue streams. McCain passionately advocates for the enduring value of print in an increasingly digital world: "Mom can take photographs of their kid themselves, but they can't create a yearbook." This authenticity becomes increasingly precious in an era of AI-generated content, with McCain noting how people are "longing for stuff that isn't made up."

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Captura's Platform
• 4:17 Michelle's Background and Parent-Focused Approach
• 8:43 Marketing Insights and Email Testing
• 11:28 Yearbooks: Ownership and Opportunity
• 19:11 Yearbook Technology and Features
• 27:42 Print vs. Digital: Preserving Traditions
• 31:02 Growth Opportunities in Volume Photography
• 34:20 Closing Thoughts on Industry Legacy

Transcript

Erin Manning: 0:02

Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau. The Dead Pixels Society podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Advertek Printing, and Independent Photo Imagers.

Gary Pageau: 0:18

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we've got a twofer. We've got two guests. We've got Tim McCain, the chief evangelist of Captura, and Michele Fenderschneider, who is the VP of Commerce, and she comes from outside the industry into school photography. So we're going to be talking about yearbooks, we're going to be talking about AI, we'll be talking about technology, and it's going to be a great conversation. Hi Tim, Hi Michele, how are you today? How are you, gary? We're going to be talking about AI, we'll be talking about technology, and it's going to be a great conversation. Hi Tim, how are you Michele? How are you?

Michele Federschneider: 0:48

today. How are you, gary? We're doing good. Hi, good to be here.

Gary Pageau: 0:50

Captura has been around in another form for a lot of years and you announced earlier this year the name change and the introduction to the market of the Captura name and also kind of combining all the platforms into one singular platform, if you will, the disparate parts from the various acquisitions. How's that been going, Tim? It's been going great.

Tim McCain: 1:10

We took ImageQuix, PhotoLynx, Foto Merchant, and simple Photo, all those businesses over the last two, three years and combined and took the best things out of all of them and put them into one complete platform. When we did that, we wanted to rebrand on the new identity which is Captura One new name and one new platform and one new experience for our customers. Like customer-centric . Now, with all those and the features that we have in the system, we've again, again, taken all the best features out and building and we're continuing to build and we're all about making our customers more money or more, anything, more time well, that's sort of the slogan there right make, more is sort of absolutely with that yeah, so I'm sure it's been completely seamless and there's been no hiccups through this whole.

Tim McCain: 2:02

Yeah, you know it was easy, no problems, like it was just yeah all the customers love it.

Tim McCain: 2:07

It's been sure, sure yeah, no, it's, it's been. Um, it's been an uphill battle. It's been, it's been a road. I mean we had, I had, uh, photo links for 20 some years and then just getting that and and taking that experience into image quicks and then melding those cultures right, and then we took photo merchant another culture that had SimpleP hoto with them and melding that and then, along with sky lab, which is now enhanced right, right, all those people like that, so it's like a big marriage right, of a bunch of different families that come from different ways of thinking and I think we've done good at we have a thing called the capture away playbook, a Bible that we live by, right, and the way we treat people and I think everybody's coming around, it's starting to get. It was rough, there's no line, and there were some casualties in the war.

Gary Pageau: 2:57

Was there anything that, when you were looking at putting this whole conglomeration together, where your perception changed, where it's like you thought it was going to go one way and it went a different way, based on either technology or customer input? Can you think of like one thing that kind of went in a different direction?

Tim McCain: 3:19

Yeah, one of the things I could say is the way that we approach the yearbook industry. That was different. We had PlicBooks and we've revamped that and it's Captura Yearbooks now. It's not just a name change; there's a bunch of stuff. But I thought the new PhotoLynx products but were considered legacy because they were on the old platform would continue on In the PlicGo the PlicBooks world. That changed on in the click go the click books world. That changed and we went into this yearbook model.

Tim McCain: 3:47

That is quite different than we had thought originally as well as the way that we go after the customer experience and customer marketing. Quite frankly, like with Michele, the customer marketing way we used to do things, and that was a total shock to me, like again, I don't want to speak for Michele, but she we jumped in and we're like she was looking at it and going why are you guys doing stuff like this?

Tim McCain: 4:08

You know an outside perspective because we have these 25 year blinders of school pictures in the industry. Michele came in with fresh eyes and was you know it's been. It's that changed the way we look at a lot of stuff. Like Gary, we didn't even know before Michele got here. To be quite honest, what an email yielded. Right, send out an email and Michele's like we got all those numbers. Now we got all that data. She knows exactly what people are doing in the shop. She, she does ab testing here. I'm still on all your stuff.

Michele Federschneider: 4:37

That's okay, I was gonna say I mean, I think it's it's. It's been a and I've only been here since january, but I think it's been a continuation of what has worked well in the past. But we've gotten smarter, so we're investing in our data infrastructure and really understanding what's working well, building and refining our best practices from that in addition to just automating. So, like we've been doing things you know that work really well. But how do we, you know, automate things like cart abandonment emails or some of the things that can be really dynamic based on the parent shopping behavior?

Michele Federschneider: 5:16

And so it's good for the studio because some of those work really well and it's also good because, you know, it gives us a little time back to focus on some other more critical, like high value work operationally. So yeah there's been a lot of good progress and I think, more than you know, just building on the foundation that was already there and getting a little, maybe, smarter with the ways that we're working.

Gary Pageau: 5:40

So talk a little bit about where you came from, your background and what you're kind of bringing to the volume photography space.

Michele Federschneider: 5:48

Sure. So I spent almost 17 years at Vistaprint, working across mainly marketing, merchandising and product management. So Vistaprint is a solution that focuses on design and printing for small businesses, but we also have consumer lines or stationary photo gifts. So there are a lot of interesting parallels from how I worked on the e-commerce and the shopping experience at Vistaprin and how that translates to just how parents come and buy photos online. There's been a lot of interesting parallels to bring for this world to optimize.

Michele Federschneider: 6:26

And at the end of the day, I think one of the nice things in the last six months or so is we've really tried to champion the parents' feedback and really bring that to life within our organization. So where are they getting stuck in the shopping experience? What are the things that they're looking for? What are their key? What are the things that they're looking for?

Michele Federschneider: 6:46

What are?

Michele Federschneider: 6:46

their key points, the feedback that they're sharing with us, for us to both understand that, to then cater our shopping experience or make tweaks to make that easier.

Gary Pageau: 6:57

Sure.

Michele Federschneider: 6:58

Parents are shopping online all the time, and so the solution that we bring has to be really emotional, because it's usually their child's image or a family member's image, but also really familiar and easy, and so it's really finding the balance between there, and a lot of that is what I did at Vistaprint, so it's been kind of a nice transition and a new industry where there's a ton of opportunity.

Tim McCain: 7:22

And Gary, she's not just guessing at stuff. So this is what I love about not just the data and the analysis that she brought with her, but she hired a firm that went out and did, you know, shopping on our website and gave us feedback about what they real moms going in, real moms and dads ordering pictures and then giving us video feedback. Yeah, that they said this was too hard to do. This was not. This was easy. This, you know, looking at where the rage clicks are, like I think you had Pindo implemented with a lot of this stuff and right and some of the testing.

Michele Federschneider: 7:54

Yeah.

Tim McCain: 7:55

So this is real time data with real parents and we're not just having a panel or we're not just guessing at what, like we've done in this for years. We've like we think mom wants to do this. Right, we know now. We've been interviewing her for several weeks now.

Gary Pageau: 8:11

So one of the things I think that's different, that's changed over the last five years, is there's been more direct access to mom mom, if you want to call that the customer than there has been in the past. Because you know, in the bad old days of volume photography, the school controlled the contact with the parent and that kind of goes by the wayside, because this is all. This is kind of like a new application of a modern approach, if you will Right. Can you give an example of when you're like doing A testing with uh, with an email, the kind of things that are resonating with with mom that may, in the old way, they might have thought it was the other way yeah, so I mean things like subject line testing, so like what's going to get them to open the email and look at um the email like just engage?

Michele Federschneider: 9:03

and then what are the types of tactics that will get them to click to see their image, to see the images online?

Michele Federschneider: 9:09

It may sound overly simplified, but the more simple and direct our messaging is typically the better response rate that we get from mom.

Michele Federschneider: 9:18

80% of our traffic is coming to our site on mobile, so it needs to be punchy and to the point.

Michele Federschneider: 9:26

Coming to our site on mobile, so it needs to be punchy and to the point. And so you know, sometimes in the past we had had these really big images that were very branded to the studios and, while beautiful, the really core message would be pushed down pretty far on the page. And so having, like the buttons and the calls to action above the fold, having any discount messaging higher up on the page, really reducing image size, both for, you know, ease of scannability but also loading within different devices, has been really helpful, and so we've been able to fine tune a lot of those through really iterative rounds of A-B testing to get to what we deem like here's a best practice for each of our email templates, based on testing, and so we can feel really confident as we implement those with all the studios, existing or new, that they're getting the best experience and we continue to refine that Even in the fall. We're continuing to test just with this volume and to continuously learn, so that that's been really insightful.

Gary Pageau: 10:28

That's kind of counterintuitive, though, right, because, at least for our industry, because they always want the image to be the hero. Right, because that's the product. Is you know that great picture of your preschool or the great picture of a middle school, or whatever?

Michele Federschneider: 10:43

Yeah.

Gary Pageau: 10:43

And but that doesn't necessarily have the call to action very clear.

Michele Federschneider: 10:49

Yeah, and it's. You know, we've found it's different, spinning the message differently based on where you are in the life cycle.

Michele Federschneider: 10:59

So like your photos online is a great example of that. Like you want to see the image, it's this big reveal moment. That's when maybe the picture can really be the hero, versus as you get into some of the seasonal campaigns through the holidays. Maybe it's highlighting certain types of products that might incentivize to you know people to come back and purchase again. Right, and being able to target those audiences in different ways with different messaging, can be really impactful.

Gary Pageau: 11:26

So, tim, One of the things you mentioned earlier was yearbooks, and that's been an area of the marketplace that has really been through a lot in the last year or so A lot of changes with some of the software platforms, a lot of changes with some of the vendors and, you know, kind of the emphasis. It seems almost to be like there's a bigger emphasis now on it because it's another print opportunity for the volume studios, especially those who are doing, you know, preschool or elementary school, they're kind of the younger grades. I think there's an opportunity there for like a soft cover kind of thing. What are you seeing? Because that's kind of where you came from right. The yearbook is sort of your genesis into this business.

Tim McCain: 12:08

Yeah, we were with PhotoLynx, we were with Workflow and then we entered into the yearbook software market, probably about 10 years ago, and the biggest change, gary, is people are realizing that those are your photos that you took. Why aren't you making money off them? Right? So the big yearbook companies of the past, they used to just hand over your PSPA CD and they would make a yearbook and that was that. And there's no way for the photographer to make any money off of their you know, creative images, right? So now people are like getting hip to that and they're, they're creating their own books and there's easy ways to do it.

Tim McCain: 12:41

There's companies out there that are that are publishers or aggregators of that and the software just makes it that much easier. You know, we have our, our Captbook software. That's just so simple and easy to use, especially for what you're talking about, those 44 page saddle stitch. You know, easy books for the elementary school. We crush it and you can send it off to any number of places to get it handled. One like a studio source, or, you know, district Photo does some, and there's, you know, Strawbridge Studios and Interstate, and all those guys do a lot of you know printing of those type of books. And if you're going to, if you're going to take the image, why not capture the most amount that you can? Because you're doing a lot for free. You're going to those free shoots and taking yearbook photos, right? They're going to the football game and capturing candidates that go into the yearbook, and that's somebody's time, that's somebody's time, that's somebody's money, that's somebody's effort and we shouldn't just only get a part of the picture package. They should get a part of the yearbook.

Gary Pageau: 13:39

So, like you said, there's been a lot of changes in the marketplace with some of your competitors.

Tim McCain: 14:02

They all got good software. We feel we have the best software. We also are a software company. We're not a photography company that is putting out software. You know that tends to either cater to the company that created its needs, right, and not everyone else. We're taking everybody's feedback, also when they're busy printing their yearbooks and any other competitor. I'm speaking in general terms. Right, we're not. We're a software company, right. We're busy with our customers' needs, not our own.

Gary Pageau: 14:35

Okay, so what are some of the things when you talk about the value of a yearbook, right, that will help grow the market. How can we, as an industry, convey some of the value of a yearbook in a printed product? Because I think that's something that, as an industry, we're not doing.

Tim McCain: 14:55

Yeah, look, I'm a member of SPOA, a board member of SPOA. I believe in the tradition of school photography and yearbooks, right, a hundred percent. And I think that you know several companies have tried digital books, putting them on your phone, all that type of stuff. You're not going to have this phone, you're not going to have that media, but you can have that print. Everybody's running to the underneath their bed and pulling out the shoe box and they're grabbing photos. They're grabbing their yearbook from 30 years ago. They're bringing that to the reunion. They're not popping out the phone and saying, look at Jimmy, when he, you know it's so, it's the traditional print. That is that is so important.

Tim McCain: 15:37

And I personally feel that yearbooks are the way that we're going to tie Look mom, mom or dad right, I keep saying mom, because 85% of the purchasers are are the mothers. But mom or dad can take a photograph of their kid themselves. They can get a damn good accidental headshot if they want it to right. Sure, they can't create a yearbook. They don't have the permission to put everybody else's photos in there for that child's memories later on in life. And I believe through yearbooks we're tying the tradition of school photography back to that right. So I believe yearbooks is something that they can't do on their own, and since they can't do it, they're on their own. We piggyback on that with school photography. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, and I firmly believe that we're having.

Tim McCain: 16:24

We're seeing a resurgence right now where people are going away from. I mean, I just talked to a kid that's taking film in college. Right, we're going back to this traditional stuff and people have a longing for stuff that isn't made up, it's not generative AI, it's not fake, it's not phony, there's no filters, right. I want to see my child in the yearbook with the braces and the pimples, and this is me personally. I'm not knocking anybody that wants to have, you know, but I want to see how goofy they were when they were goofy. You know, that's part of the. That's part of the experience.

Gary Pageau: 16:59

Right, I mean you are offering the enhancement, we are, we have that. We have that because some people want that.

Tim McCain: 17:04

Some people, and I get it. Me personally, though, I air on the traditional side of stuff. Maybe that's because I'm 52 years old, right, but I also I truly believe that we're getting more and more in that realm and people are going back to that. There's a resurgence of people wanting, longing for the traditional, as we have this made, especially with the generative ai, and you can fake anything and deep fakes and all these videos where you don't know what's true, and all this other stuff we can have the reality of a print on a yearbook, and it's a beautiful thing.

Gary Pageau: 17:36

You know, one of the things I think you're touching on is sort of a thing that touches on various segments of the industry. Right, like you said earlier, people are shooting film. Right, kodak's back to making film seven days a week, you know, yeah, which is crazy when you think about it. But that gets back to, I think, where the value of school photography or even vacation photos and all this is. You know the authenticity of it. Right, you can have AI generate, you know, pictures of your trip to Paris, but what matters here are the pictures you took, right. Right, and I think that authentic piece is sort of something you know. Technology is great. We all love technology, right, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's just a tool to get you to whatever that memory is.

Tim McCain: 18:25

So look, gary, there's guys like Ed Monahan that 15 years ago told us you know prints packages, and I can't remember what else he said. It was print packages and screens.

Tim McCain: 18:35

Yeah, so Ed used to preach all that. I think that Ed was way ahead of his time, smart guy, way ahead of his time. Yeah, right, so we're there now. Right, we can have all that content you're talking about. We can have the AI generated content. We can have content from mom. We can generated content. We can have content from mom. We can have professional content. All exist in the same spot, like how beautiful is that. We're getting there right now. Right now, we're messing with stuff that in captura, where you can upload, you know, the parent stuff into a professional package, you get the professional print right right and then the photographer gets to participate in creating something with the parent right and you.

Tim McCain: 19:14

we do that now with yearbooks, with the Candid Uploader. Parents can upload, you know, whatever they want into that and somebody can put that in the book. So I think that getting there and what Ed had foretold so many years ago is coming to fruition right now.

Gary Pageau: 19:27

Yeah, I think you're right, Because I think the ability to customize a yearbook makes it even better, because I always thought one of the knocks on the yearbook was, you know, especially at the high school level right, if you had a big school, you might be in a mugshot and you might be in a teen picture, but you may not be anywhere else in the book Because either they didn't get your picture or the photo editor didn't like you, or the picture was terrible or whatever. But the ability to customize it with either the person's own photos is, I think, a huge opportunity that I think needs to be leveraged.

Tim McCain: 20:05

Yeah, I agree, because otherwise you've got just pretty popular people like Michele dominating the book and us ugly guys. Don't get in it, gary.

Gary Pageau: 20:19

That's right. So, Michele, from an e-commerce standpoint, you are charged with conveying this message right? You've got to take this fairly complex technology of hey, you can change the people's complexion a little bit, you can change the backgrounds, you can do some of these things, but you can be able to convey that. Do some of these things, but you can be able to convey that. What are your thoughts on the challenge of the industry on that?

Michele Federschneider: 20:38

Yeah, I think the role that we have to play as a software company and as a platform is to balance all of the wonderful aspects of customization, but to do that in a way that is very simple for the parent to execute. And so, you know, on our core website it's the things like different backgrounds, different image editing options, right, like, how do we do that in a way where it's actually fun, right To like try out these different things to see how they're going to look and to get the photo that you want. And we're looking at the same thing for yearbooks. So you know, we have a portion of our business that are, that's, using our yearbook e-commerce solution, so it all has the ability to purchase books, to have things like add-ons for parents to.

Michele Federschneider: 21:29

You know, you mentioned, a yearbook might only have a school photo, but parents can put, you know, half page or full page notes or things like that for the students in there, and so that's a nice option.

Michele Federschneider: 21:42

And so there's additional features that kind of make things feel more personal, has a benefit for the studio, because, you know, you can personalize your cover, you can add the name and the year.

Michele Federschneider: 21:51

And so now, personalize your cover, you can add the name and the year, and so now that yearbook feels much more specific to the student and you know it kind of incentivizes the parents to buy because it's not just the generic thing that they might pick up in the office, which would also be an option. But you know we can. You know the studios can make a little more money off that. We give the parent a really easy shopping experience and so also the ability to market to them. That's something that we're really leaning into this year is all of the things I talked about that we're doing for our core business, for marketing. We can also talk to parents about yearbooks and remind them when it's yearbook season. You know you don't have to remember the flyer that the school hung on the door but thing in your inbox that's really easy to order from, and so we're hoping studios see a real benefit from that as well.

Gary Pageau: 22:41

Now in the marketing piece, you know. So you probably have a lot of companies, customers who are you know, we'll just do it. We have that relationship, we can do it, we're smart people. And then you have another group of people who surely need all the help that they can get. How are you set up to kind of handle those two dichotomies? I imagine you get a lot of people who you know either they haven't done a lot of yearbooks or they're trying to get into the, you know, trying to grow that piece of their business. Other people have said you know, hey, you know, we've got our own printing plant where we've been set up for this for the years. We don't care. What's your approach there? How are you communicating with the customers?

Michele Federschneider: 23:17

Yeah, I mean, I think you know we have a couple of phases of just there's some awareness of like, hey, we're doing yearbooks. Do you know the value as a customer that a yearbook could bring to your business? And conveying those numbers. And, to Tim's point, you're already doing the work and so if there's an opportunity for you to get in with the school and to offer this as a, you know, an addition to your business, that's a really nice gentle market and we're really trying to aim the customers with. You know some of that, like what are the key messages? Like how do you go to the school and make this pitch? And you know what are the really compelling aspects of you as a photographer, but also the software that you can leverage from us to make that case, and so we have a number of resources online and then we're really working with our customers individually to, you know, help them get those contracts.

Gary Pageau: 24:10

Now, tim, from a technology standpoint you mentioned. You know you've been dropping the Gen AI buzzwords and all those fun things, but you've got to be looking at it from a standpoint of you know you can put all this stuff in there, but if it's not used, or if it's used poorly or terribly, you know you've got challenges there. How are you evaluating what technology to put in there?

Tim McCain: 24:31

Yeah, so that's a good question. We have a great team. We have a great product team right now and we use a lot of parental feedback, a lot of photographer feedback. Our product team gets together and they do their own testing. Yeah, there's a lot of new tech that you can put in there. We have our machine learning team, like we were talking about AI. We have that in-house. We don't outsource any of that stuff. We already got those guys right.

Tim McCain: 24:53

So our product team looks at that. They say, hey, what about this? We have other committees that look at stuff and go, yeah, that would be good for this or that wouldn't. And then we also shop it around with some of our bigger clients that use yearbooks in our software to create them right. The big thing that, gary, I think that we have above everyone else is we don't create, you know, spoa or PSPA yearbook disks. When you put it into our Captura system and you use our Captura yearbooks, it's already there. So school logs on all the panel pages are built automatically, because that's one of the big things that we have on all the panel pages are built automatically, because that's one of the big things that we have Any subject info data that they need to change around. Instead of McCain they said McCain's with an S right. They can do it right there and you don't have to go back to your photographer to make a change, to get them a new disc. All that stuff is just right there and we're completely online with all of it.

Gary Pageau: 25:44

Yeah, and that alone is a big thing when, I'm sure, because you know things happen right, like you said an extra s gets printed, an extra key gets held down in the input area and it's you know it's. It's crazy on picture day, right, trying to capture all that stuff yeah, any number of things.

Tim McCain: 26:00

And when it goes through our system again, we know from school photography, one of the biggest pain points for years is creating those. You know I call them discs because I'm 52 years old. But those uploads, right, those links, right, yeah, you know Dropbox or however else they were getting them from the school to Jostens, herff Jones, taylor, any of those other publishing companies, right, and the years are now. You just open up your Capture yearbooks and it's there. So the school gets a link with their name, you know, and they go and they create a password and their school's already uploaded into the system. They can start working on their book right away. There's no waiting.

Gary Pageau: 26:34

Oh yeah, that's really not jimmy, that's james, and then we can they can change it right right and which has never been able to be done so are you focused only on a print product, or are you going to be offering some sort of electronic version, just to even just offer it? Or do you think it's just not something the market really wants?

Tim McCain: 26:56

All right. So you never say never and I'm one voice in a bunch, so we have. We have a big team here. I personally think that it's been done and it's flopped several times over. Yeah, it's getting back to my original statement of preserving school photography and preserving the tradition of prints.

Erin Manning: 27:16

Right.

Tim McCain: 27:17

Big thing that we do and we believe in. I mean, we support the SPO and that's what SPO is all about. Right, the School Photographers of America. So I can't say that like I would be jumping up and down and saying let's do that If the product team brought it over and said this is what we want to do, but again, I'm one vote in about seven or eight.

Gary Pageau: 27:35

Yeah, I just like I said, I've seen those various things and I've seen the demos and all and it seems like cool stuff, but it's almost like it's trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

Tim McCain: 27:48

Exactly, exactly and it's. It's also when I start thinking about this stuff. I, you know, I think about eight tracks and VHS and all the media changes and Prince Vince is a whole thing. Right, we've had Prince in the 1800s. So, I don't like it again, Like I wouldn't be the first person to do it.

Gary Pageau: 28:04

But again, you never say never If there's a market demand, and it started happening we would participate in that, and I don't think it would be a replacement for a yearbook.

Tim McCain: 28:15

It might be an add-on Additive would be a good thing. I mean, we've seen it probably five or six times throughout the last 10 years. People pop up with stuff and they pop up with digital ID cards and then you know, with a swoop of a pen they say you can't bring your phone to school, right, and then that's that, right. So we don't know. I just the print media is always going to be around.

Gary Pageau: 28:37

Right. Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that about the school ID thing, because that's exactly what's happening, right. And in Michigan we've got several school districts here who have said nope, we don't want the distraction, we're going to take the kids' phones when they walk in.

Tim McCain: 28:50

Right. So if we have school IDs on our phones, digital IDs, what happens then? Right.

Gary Pageau: 28:55

Right, exactly.

Tim McCain: 28:56

And the school's not making the laws, the lawmakers. I mean there's a lot of nuanced stuff, but PVC cards aren't getting taken away and neither is the paper print of a yearbook.

Gary Pageau: 29:09

Yeah, it is. It is interesting. I was sort of always. It's coming back around again now. A lot of schools are capturing video with their content that they're doing. Is there anything you can do with that in the print format? I've tried. I've seen different people.

Tim McCain: 29:23

You know they're doing screen grabs out of video and they're trying to do different things with qr codes to launch videos yeah, I don't know if you remember this about, uh, 15 years ago, I had a program called jump seat. Yeah, we put qr codes into yearbooks, yeah, right, and you uploaded the video to a website and then you would put your phone over that qr code and then an ar marker would be there. I actually ed monahan, was who kicked this off for me when I went to one of his things at DP2 years ago, and so we created Jumpseat and you could put a AR marker with a QR tag and it would pop up with the wrestling video on the wrestling page, right, I think it was a little bit again ahead of its time. I think there's companies like Flam or RMBR right now.

Gary Pageau: 30:07

Yeah, we're doing that.

Tim McCain: 30:08

Yep, Chris Garcia, they're doing that, and I think you could actually do it yourself too. There's a lot of different ways to go about it, but that's cool stuff too. But I'm going to go back a little bit again is what happens when that website's down? What happens when the QR code? It has to be additive, it can't be in supplement of right.

Gary Pageau: 30:28

At least you've got that print right To kick off that video.

Tim McCain: 30:32

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I think it's cool, it's all neat stuff, right?

Gary Pageau: 30:36

So Michele from a marketing standpoint. You know there's a lot going on in kind of the education world. That's kind of a challenge, right. I mean I was talking to somebody the other day about the volume photography business. They said, well, it can't grow that much because they aren't building any more schools. So to have healthy growth in an industry, you know, where are you seeing opportunities for growth?

Michele Federschneider: 31:02

We look at a couple of different factors. So one is just like are we getting people to participate? So how many, you know, are they buying?

Gary Pageau: 31:10

Expansion rate, buy rate, yeah, Exactly the classic yeah.

Michele Federschneider: 31:13

Yeah, and then I think the bigger opportunities that we're seeing is in how we can increase that average order value. So I talked about the simplicity of the experience. That's something we're leaning into, like how do you make it easier to get the second or the third product in the single session without needing to recustomize or go through the whole process again?

Tim McCain: 31:36

Right.

Michele Federschneider: 31:36

And certainly there are other, you know, new products. There are other ways that can be really impactful for average order value. And then the third is just multiple purchases, and so that's something again that we're really focused on, even for buyers. So let's say you've come and you've bought a print, but over the holidays, like, can we talk about the specialty items we have, or the card?

Gary Pageau: 31:59

Yeah, sort of the remarketing, retargeting kind of thing, yeah.

Michele Federschneider: 32:02

Exactly like the mugs for Mother's Day, or get one-stop shop to get everything you need, and so incentivizing the second purchase, again with the data of knowing, maybe, what they've purchased before and making it different or relevant.

Gary Pageau: 32:19

Or even if they didn't purchase, maybe it's because at that time they didn't want anything, but maybe now they want a Christmas ornament for grandma.

Michele Federschneider: 32:27

Yeah, and trying, you know we're trying multiple tactics to see like what resonates with these different audiences and different segments, you know. So the people that don't participate initially, you know, will they 60 days later with certain types of promotions or with different products featured or with just a different message, as you mentioned. So there's a lot of opportunity to kind of play with products featured or with just a different message, as you mentioned. So there's a lot of opportunity to kind of play with all three of those to increase both who's participating but also the value that we're getting from each of the participants.

Gary Pageau: 32:59

And how are you guys talking to your customers, the studios, about this opportunity? Because I think that's the other piece of it. Right, you got to have to have them buy in.

Tim McCain: 33:10

Yeah, we have Gary. We have a wonderful marketing team here. Besides the B2C marketing team and the commerce, which Michele does, we also have guys like James and Emily and Ann and Leighton that work here, that push out at events right we have our MVP event.

Tim McCain: 33:27

We're at SPAC, we're at SPOA. We do a lot of stuff there, but we also do webinars. We did one today on yearbooks. One went out today with Christian and Brendan Colopy from Strawbridge talking about the importance of yearbooks and taking your photos and making money off them, right. So we try to do a lot of education around it. Again, this is for one. You know me, this is I've been doing this 25 years. I love this. This is my legacy. I want to see this all the way through and and all the way through means it's still thriving when I'm gone, right, when I'm not here, when I'm not around. So we love this. We believe in the tradition of it. We want our customers to make more money off of the photos that they take. What Michele was talking about the stuff about the holidays really blows me away, because you think about it and we've never really some people have done it, not at scale. We're talking. We're all P&G dropped out backgrounds now, right.

Tim McCain: 34:19

So we can take and we can do our fall photo. But then we can turn around and put snow behind that at Christmas and put it on a mug and say happy holidays for grandma. Right, put snow behind that at. Christmas and put it on a mug and say happy holidays for grandma. Right, People have done that onesie, twosie, but we're doing it in mass and I think that that's the neat thing that we can do now.

Gary Pageau: 34:37

Yeah, so where can people go for more information to learn about all the wonderful things in the world of Captura?

Tim McCain: 34:42

Yeah, so they can go to capturaio, right, and we've got all kinds of stuff in there. They can sign up for our newsletter, they can sign up for we have classes that they can sign up for. There's a bunch of videos there and if you go to capturaio forward slash products, forward slash yearbooks, then you can learn all about the yearbook stuff that we're doing right now awesome well.

Gary Pageau: 35:05

Thanks, tim. Great to see you again. Great to meet you, Michele. I'm looking forward to seeing you at an upcoming event, probably SPAC. Yes, sir, thank you. Gary, talk to you soon.

Erin Manning: 35:17

Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixel Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at wwwthedeadpixelssocietycom.