How To Go From Shooting for Small, To Big Brands

For many photographers, the goal is to eventually shoot for some pretty major brand names. I’ve got big goals too, some of which I’ve not even scratched the surface on yet. But I’ve also achieved some of the goals I had for myself, that a few years ago, felt totally unattainable! So, if you’re looking at your dream client list and thinking to yourself: “There’s no way that I can make that happen” I’d love to challenge you on that. Because trust me, if I can, you can too.

Of course, aiming big requires big efforts. It’s not going to happen overnight, or magically just show up. So hopefully this blog post will give you a bit of a roadmap to follow on how you can go from shooting for small brands, to really big ones.

Get Your Portfolio In Check

First of all, you need to be sure that your portfolio is up to scratch. Have you got your style narrowed down yet? Do you know exactly who you want to shoot for? If that doesn’t feel clear to you yet, it’s not going to feel clear to those big clients that you’re aiming for either. It might seem counter intuitive, but the higher you aim, the more narrow your work should be. If you want to shoot for high fashion brands, really you should only be sharing high fashion work. If you want to work for commercial brands, having too much editorial work in your book might be confusing. Get super clear on who you want to work for, and make sure that your portfolio truly reflects that.

Pay Attention to Trends

Big businesses will be paying close attention to trends. If your work is reflecting trends from ten or 15 years ago, you may need to update some of your imagery. Of course, certain trends are timeless and will never go out of fashion, but it’s really important that you know what the industry is currently focused on the most, what the designers are drawing inspiration from, so that you can be a part of that, too! Make sure you’re reading websites like Business of Fashion, and the major magazines like Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, etc so that you are on top of the trends, and industry news.

Study Hair, Make Up and Styling

If there’s ever anything that comes up in my portfolio reviews with industry professionals, it tends to be make up, hair and styling. It’s SO important that as a photographer, you understand what your clients are looking for in hair, make up and styling. You sadly cannot just leave it up to the other creatives in your team to have complete control over it. I 100% think you need to collaborate and work as a team, but it’s so important that when you do these collaborations, that they are also on board with what the goal of the shoot for you is. If they aren’t, you could end up with make up that is either too commercial, or too editorial, depending on what you’re aiming to create.

Potential clients will be paying attention to the way you’re styling your shoots, so study what the people at the very top of their game are doing. What does the make up look like? How much is there on the model? What does the hair look like? How is she/he styled? Make a note of all of those things, and apply them to your own shoots.

Focus in your marketing - sending quarterly mailers, pitching to brands regularly,

Focus In On Your Marketing

You could have the most beautiful work in the world, but if no one ever sees it, you won’t get hired! People need to know about in order to hire you. So if you want to work for big brands, you need to be telling them about you and who you are! Pitching is the best way to do that, and is 100x more effective than sending out blanket email newsletters (although those are still useful and I encourage you to do those as well!). If you were a brand, and received a kind, thoughtout email from a photographer who genuinely loved your brand and had work in their portfolio that looked just like what you aim to create in your business, wouldn’t you be happy to know about them? Even if you head back from a brand and they say that they don’t need you right now, that doesn’t mean that they won’t need you in future.

Working with big brands requires you taking big steps, and taking big action in the direction of your dreams.

If pitching feels totally terrifying to you, don’t worry! You can download my free pitching template right here, or if you want to take things even further, my online course, Pitching With Confidence, is relaunching really soon! Read more about that here.

Increase Your Prices

Whoa, what? I’m actually telling you to put your prices up? Yes, yes I am.

If you want to work with big brands, you’ve got to start charging big prices! Brands will be extremely confused if you show up with this incredible work, market yourself really well, and then quote them a very low rate. That will 100% ring alarm bells to them. Think about your own experiences: if you’ve ever been quoted something and thought: “That sounds a bit cheap… what’s the catch?! They must not be that good!” Well guess what, the brands will think the same thing.

Shift Your Mindset

In order to work for big brands, the biggest chance you’ll need to make is in your mindset. You’ll need to start thinking big, thinking of yourself as a photographer who is capable of doing these big campaigns, as someone who deserves to be paid big amounts for their work, and so much more. Honestly, you can do all the strategy, have all of the things in place, but until you start to think in the way a photographer who’s shooting for major brands thinks, you’ll struggle.

One of the things that I like to do now is think to myself: “What would the Olivia who’s already shooting for X be doing? Who would she be collaborating with? What would she be investing in?” The goal is to project yourself into being that person NOW and not waiting until “one day.” You almost need to become that person in your head, and imagine that person, before you can actually physically be that person.

Another way that you can help yourself is to write yourself visualisations, or if writing isn’t your thing, just let yourself day dream! I do this before I go to bed every night, and literally just lie back and imagine myself shooting for my dream clients. I try to imagine how I’d feel, what I’d wear, what the set would look like, who I’d have there with me… every detail.

This helps to make it feel like it’s just around the corner, and like I’ve already lived it, instead of just being a bit of a random daydream that I have.

And I promise you, that as you start to do this, magically you’ll start to notice ways that you can start to embody that person… today.