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What: New product defines brand new market

OnRequest Images is the world’s leading provider of on brand custom imagery. The company’s innovative service was the first of its kind in the industry, combining the made-to-order aspects of assignment photography with the convenience and affordability of stock photography. ?I was the 4th person to come on to the ORI founding team, and although I remained an independent contractor I held a variety of roles and levels of responsibility during our 2 1/2 plus years of engagement. My first role was to architect and design the front-end and back-end systems that would enable our 1600 photographers world-wide to access and fulfill custom assignments. My design role lead to my becoming the VP of Marketing in charge of launching the company and the brand. Later, I became VP of Product & Process Management working on streamlining our systems and processes as we raised Series A funding.

The Challenge: When we launched OnRequest Images we had an interesting challenge — we had to launch not only a new brand, but we had to define a new market within an incredibly embedded industry. Our initial product offering OnRequest CustomStock™ combined the best of custom photography with the convenience and price of stock. But art directors and agency executives had a difficult time imagining how we could offer high-quality solutions quickly and affordably.

My Role: As VP of Marketing it was my job to create collateral and direct marketing pieces to drive interested in trying our service. With limited budget I didn’t have money to hire a creative team, and with a highly resistant target audience of creative directors and ad execs, we knew that our creative needed to knock their socks off. ?

The Results: We decided on a strategy that showed the before and after of how the CustomStock™ service worked. Because we were defining a new way of aquiring imagery, we knew we had to appeal to an art director’s pain points specifically; spending too much time searching stock databases for sub-par imagery. Below are a two of our early direct marketing piece

[Note: OnRequest Images now offers a variety of custom on-brand solutions. And they now have a professional creative team doing their visual design. I am still highly involved with the company and would be delignted if you wanted to check them out at www.onrequestimages.com