follow the yellow brick road

Today is your lucky day! Not only do you now have a chance (read on below…) to get the five “bonus items” if you already have a ClickinMoms membership – we also have a great new vendor / guest post / giveaway from Kori and Kate! They are here to introduce their new Photographer’s Pricing Wizard.

Kori and Kate is a team of two women; Kori a graphic artist & designer and Kate, a senior portrait photographer. They combined their talents to create Kori and Kate; a design and Photoshop template resource for photographers.

But their latest product is a far cry from anything design related. They’ve created a pricing tool that will take away all of the blood, sweat and tears usually involved in figuring out your pricing strategy.

Follow the yellow brick road to the Photographer’s Pricing Wizard, where they are giving away two FREE copies to our followers.

This is no ordinary Wizard. It’s the close your eyes, click your heels together and repeat “there’s no pain in pricing” wizard.

Never again will you have to do the math yourself! That’s not a typo folks, it’s true! The Pricing Wizard does all the math for you. Even a scarecrow can use it.

As long as you have access to the costs your lab charges for the products you offer, you in like Flynn!

The Pricing Wizard is a Microsoft Excel based tool. It works on a Mac and a PC, but you must have Excel. (Numbers and Open Office are not compatible.)

The first working tab on the Wizard is where you list your individual products and their cost. There are approximately 75 pre-loaded products with costs to show you how the Wizard works. These can be typed over or removed and new items can be added as needed.

The Collections tab is where you build the collections or packages that you offer your clients. Select the items you include in your collection and change the quantity to the right number for each item. The Wizard does the rest! You’ll quickly see the costs, retail, profit and margin for each collection as you build and change them. Each time you edit the collection, it automatically recalculates instantly.

Simply change the Collection name to whatever you use in your business. It will update on all the tabs within the Wizard, like magic.

The Wizard also tracks your projected sales against your actual sales for both Collections and à la carte items.

The last feature of the Wizard is to bring visibility to your current pricing and how it compares to what the Wizard calculated for you. The pricing on the left hand side is what the Wizard calculated. Change the Current Retail pricing on the right hand based on what you currently charge your clients. The Gross Profit, Margin and Mark Up are automatically calculated. You can quickly see how your current pricing measures up.

If you want to see the full instruction guide for the Pricing Wizard, click here. If you’d like to win a FREE copy of the Pricing Wzard – follow the yellow brick road using these steps to enter and WIN!

1. Visit the Kori and Kate Facebook page and “like” them.

2. Post a comment under the Paperie Boutique logo image on the Kori and Kate Facebook as to why you’d like to win the Pricing Wizard.

3. Two winners will be randomly selected based on the comments received under the Paperie Boutique logo on the K&K page.

4. All comments must be posted within 48 hours.

gratitude. journal.

When word got out from a recent post, I can’t even begin to describe the response. My brain, and heart, are overflowing with joy and amazement. How do you truly say thank you for something like this? Or the forum posts full of concern? Or the vendor notes of support (like the one when Moo‘s Vice President alerted several colleagues on staff to make sure I was taken care of just because he could). Or surprise gifts in the mail. Or Tweet DMs to check in – one from Pixel2Canvas on vacation in the middle of the Grand Canyon. Or the dozens of e-mails we’ve received. Or a note from a photographer who had just lost her husband and the father of her 5 children, worried about MY FAMILY. (We are so ok by comparison.) Or the little surprises in our PayPal account just because. I mean, it’s more than the human mind can really wrap around.

You go through life trying to do good and just make it day to day. You stumble. Sometimes you stumble hard. Sometimes you even hurt people. You dust yourself off eventually, regroup, reprioritize, remember you’re not really all that (well maybe all that, but often minus the potato chips), and promise yourself that if you don’t learn from those past mistakes what’s the point of the future…so buckle down and get to it… That’s been my 2010. I’ve buckled down and got to it. I had another such gut-check / perspective experience on a CT-scan table just over a week ago to make me even more focused on what’s really important.

In my recent Rangefinder piece, I wrote about the photographer community and my close relationship with my vendors. While being interviewed about this website, the article opened and closed with the following:

I let ‘Fit to Print’ evolve into Paperie Boutique, a standalone blog, through which I’m paying it forward to those who helped me along the way…..What has this experience taught Robyn? “I’ve learned to never underestimate the generosity of people and their willingness to teach and share,” [Robyn] says. “Just when you think you couldn’t possibly be more proud of your professional community, something as simple as a ‘thank you’ or ‘I can help with that’ never ceases to amaze.”

I’m used to being on the organization and donation collection end of things. It’s been humbling to be on the receiving end to say the very least.

Then yesterday the latest ‘random act of kindness’ showed up on my door step.

It’s no secret that I love HB Photo Packaging, but this was just beyond unreal. This was a surprise just for me, just because. You can read more of the details over here at Flickr – please make sure to add to the comments and thank them on behalf of our professional community!

And shop their weekend sale—HB Packaging is having a 10% off summer sale!

And speaking of vendors, we have a winner in the recent Design Aglow contest! It’s Silvine Designs / Silvine Photography:

Congrats to Michelle and another huge round of THANKS to Design Aglow for being such big supporters of this site, and for donating such fantastic prizes! Thanks to everyone who participated as well, and have a great weekend!

EXTRA! EXTRA!

We’re back in limited capacity! Thanks so much to everyone for their well-wishes and support! To our new advertisers, welcome! We’ll do our best to get you added in the days ahead.

I’m happy to announce we have an awesome Design Aglow giveaway this week – their new Studio Newsletter Collection magazine-style marketing tool. Read on and see more!

Want to get in front of your target market and stay in touch with your best clients in the most beautiful way? Our quarterly newsletter collection is a must for the studio who wants to stay at the top of their market!

Pre-designed, pre-written, yet 100% adaptable, we offer up a bounty of fresh ideas for topics that easily market all aspects of your studio. Show off new products, your most current images, and inspire with fab session ideas while you keep in touch with clients and prospective clients.

Four quarterly issues used for marketing with a luxury feel, printed as quadfold and mailed to best clients or used in high-tech yet cost efficient way, online. We have included instructions to make sideways scrolling online newsletter to blow your clients away via the web.

This beautiful product includes:
• four sets (winter, spring, summer, fall) of professionally written and designed pages complete with patterned backgrounds, design elements, and space to insert your own images
• A full tutorial

PRODUCT DETAILS:
• Fully customizable, consisting of unflattened .PSD files to customize all colors, text, fonts, and images
• Each brochure contains 8 – 4 x 5.5 inch pages – easily print as an accordion at your favorite lab
• Includes product images, but not portraits
• Contains directions to make an amazing online pdf with Photoshop, Acrobat and Bridge, and a slideshow with Lightroom
• Compatible with Photoshop CS or newer, Windows and Mac

How do you win? It’s simple! Leave a comment here with a positive testimonial why you love Design Aglow.

Then go to Twitter or Facebook and post:

I love Design Aglow / @designaglow – visit Paperie Boutique / paperieboutique.com by @shutterblog to win a new Studio Newsletter Collection

One lucky reader will be picked at Random by random.org from the numbered comments. Contest ends at 11:45 p.m. EDT on Friday, June 25, 2010. Good luck!

UPDATE: The winner has now been announced here – check it out!

your connection to the party line

We have a winner in the Go{4}Pro iPhone case template collection giveaway! It’s Rebecca Strang of Wise Idea Portraits:

Thanks again to Go{4}Pro, congrats to Rebecca, and a huge thank you to everyone who participated as well!

And don’t forget, Paperie readers have one more day (through Monday, May 17th) to use the discount code Paperie to get 10% off the iPhone case template collection at Go{4}Pro!

You also have until 11:59 p.m. EDT Sunday night to win a $50.00 gift code from Jamie Schultz Designs. Get to it!