For the last few years, Flying Dress Photo’s photographers on the Greek island of Santorini have spent their summers capturing the same image over and over – tourists posing against a backdrop of whitewashed houses and blue domes while donning luxurious satin gowns with ultra-long trains.
At an average of eight flying-dress photo shoots a day, each priced upwards of €550 (RM2,814) per hour per person, this one small business – whose entire model is based on delivering a single type of highly Instagram-worthy vacation photo – can bring in almost half a million dollars in sales in just four months.
That’s a conservative estimate: Customers tend to pile on additional services, which include transportation to and from the shoot’s location (€90/RM460), makeup and hair styling (€300/RM1,534), and a personal assistant to help toss the dress’s train in the air (€50/RM256). The one-size-fits-all dresses, at least, are provided to customers – though if you want to use more than one, it’ll cost an additional €120 (RM614). For a single client that books the full package, the shoot costs €1,500 (RM7,674) in all.
From Santorini to Dubai (United Arab Emirates), Aruba, Montego Bay (Jamaica) and Cappadocia (Turkiye), photography businesses are spreading to cater to tourists who splurge on lavish vacation photos.
And it’s not just the flying-dress photo studios that are raking in business since the pandemic. Canada-based photography booking platform Flytographer reported US$1mil (RM4.65mil) in monthly sales in May – the first time the company broke seven digits in a single month, compared with US$400,000 (RM1.82mil) in sales during the same period in 2019.
Flytographer provides access to local photographers in more than 300 cities. Its top-three most-popular destinations for shoots this year include Paris (France), and Maui and Honolulu in Hawaii, the United States.
“People took a pause on travel and put a lot of things on hold,” says Nicole Smith, founder and chief executive officer of Flytographer. “This is the year that a lot of people are finally taking that trip, and they want to make sure they capture it.”
Booking a shoot through Flytographer starts at US$385 (RM1,755) per hour, Smith says, and you get a set number of photos within five days. A similar company out of Indonesia, Sweet Escape, has 8,000 photographers spread across 500 cities, charging anywhere from US$130 (RM592) to US$300 (RM1,367) for hour-plus shoots. Its founder, David Soong, reports his business is nearly back to pre-pandemic levels, especially now that Asian travellers – his largest demographic – are starting to get back out into the world.
While Flytographer and Sweet Escape peddle images that make great holiday cards and can fill coffee-table books for practical-minded families – Smith says 95% of her clients are mums – companies focusing on flying-dress shoots cater to a more indulgent and higher-end clientele.
“We’ve had persons who travelled just for their (flying-dress) shoot,” says Chrisan Hunter, a Montego Bay native who founded flying-dress photo service HerDress Jamaica in August 2020. “They come for three days, and then they go home.”
That happens often with milestone events, including maternity shoots, she says, and most sessions take place in Jamaica’s major tourist areas such as Montego Bay, Ocho Rios and Negril.
Like Flying Dress Photo, HerDress Jamaica was not able to disclose sales figures. The Greek company has photographers on staff, while Hunter’s operation splits the revenue with the photographer and any additional service providers, all of whom charge for their services at market rates and collect all of their respective fees.
HerDress Jamaica “… never handles fewer than 30 shoots per month,” Hunter adds. “We work every day, year-round, basically.” With prices that range from US$350 (RM1,595) to US$450 (RM2,051) per hour per person, that yields monthly sales of at least US$10,500 (RM47,863) to be split among the service providers. Some months, however, there are upwards of 100 photoshoots, tripling the revenue.
In June, for example, 118 female tourists staying at the beach front Grand Palladium Jamaica Resort & Spa booked a group flying-dress shoot at the suggestion of their travel agent: A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that netted Hunter’s company at least US$41,000 (RM186,894) in sales.