Years ago we had a company that, on paper, was doing very well.
Bookings came in. The calendar filled. From the outside it looked like the thing you are supposed to want.
From the inside it felt… off.
We were not attracting the people we actually wanted to film for. Everybody who found us seemed to be the same kind of client. They did not love what we did. They loved that we fitted a price bracket. We were a tick on a spreadsheet, not a feeling.
TJ had been telling me for a long time that we needed to work on the brand. Properly. Not a prettier logo slapped on the same old offer. I was not convinced. The work was coming in. Why poke the bear?
She kept at it. Eventually she won.
Then an email arrived out of the blue.
A film company in the US — a studio we had been quietly idolising from the other side of the world — asked if they could buy a domain name off us.
We sat there staring at the screen. These were the people whose work we measured ourselves against. And they wanted something we happened to own.
We wrote back and said: you can have it. We do not need the money. Could we trade it for a couple of hours on a video call? Just a conversation. Tell us where we can improve.
They said yes and the chat that followed changed everything.
The way they talked about their work made one thing painfully clear: Attracting the right clients is the key to everything. Not more clients. The right ones. The ones who already love the way you see the world, before they have even booked you.
That was the start of our brand journey.
We ended up working with their own branding company in the US. It was thorough — and pretty confronting.
We locked in. And for the first six months we didn’t even talk about a business name, or colours, or websites. Not once.
They made us sit down and get painfully clear on who we were and what we actually offer as people. Not as a product.
Homework every night which we had to do separately from one another. Strengths worksheets that laid out what we were good at in business, what we were good at in life, and where our shortfalls were. That last part was the gift because once you can see what doesn’t come naturally to you, you can work on it instead of pretending it is not there.
After six months we were confident in a way we had never been. We knew what we wanted to offer. We knew who it was for. We knew who it was not for.
And in that same stretch of time, we let the old successful company quietly die.
We stopped taking bookings.
Then we started offering free films with one condition. We had to be allowed to shoot it exactly how we wanted to.
All personality. Our faces. Our way of seeing. No shrinking ourselves to fit someone else’s idea of what a film company should look like.
We shot those films while the website and branding were still being built. Two things growing at the same time: the look of us, and the proof of us.
We built our website images the same way. Zero budget. Tripod. Us. One of them was us sprawled out on a stranger’s old boat on a trailer in our apartment basement then we cut ourselves out for the sailing shot on our old site. Not glamorous but very ‘us’.
I still remember the day the woman who ran the brand company watched one of our new ‘authentically us’ films. She was gobsmacked. Her husband was a successful producer and director in LA and he was in the middle of making a horror film. She stormed into the editing room, turned off their work and put our film on.
The room went quiet… in a good way. Then: “Oh my god. This is amazing.”
It was a giant high-five from people whose taste we trusted. A reminder that what we were doing felt right. Not fashionable. Right.
They kept telling us there would be a lull after we launched. A few months of looking at an empty calendar and wondering if we had been very brave or very stupid. We were pre-warned. We expected to run at a loss for a while, because we were leading the business with personality instead of price.
What they could not really prepare us for was the feeling of doing it on purpose. We were deliberately crashing a successful business into the rocks. Throwing away rave reviews, social media followings we had spent years growing. All that effort. All those late nights. All of it, walked away from. On a feeling.
And at the exact same time we were buzzing. Stupidly excited about something nobody had even seen yet. A brand with our faces all over it. Our actual personalities, not a ‘safe’ polished version of a film company. No idea if anyone else would like it. No proof. Just us, excited about the thing that until this point had only existed in our heads and on a few films we had made for free.
The risk was of epic proportions. This might be the dumbest thing we have ever done… Or this might be the first time the business has ever felt like us.
It took two days. When we finally launched, we absolutely did not get the lull.
Within two days we already had more than thirty thousand dollars of bookings.
People loved it. Us.
And for the next ten-plus years, almost every single enquiry said some version of the same thing: “We love your website. You guys are awesome. We feel like we already know you.”
That website — that brand — became the leading push for everything that came after. It gave us the one thing we had been chasing without knowing how to name it: The freedom to film however we like.
Which, if we are honest, is the ultimate dream for anyone in a creative industry.
What we would tell anyone sitting where we sat?
If the work is coming in but none of it feels like you, that is not success. That is a holding pattern.
It took an unsolicited email, a traded domain name, six months of homework, a dead calendar on purpose, and a handful of free films shot exactly our way.
It also took TJ being right. Again.
And we still film the way we wanted to film on those free days… But for the right price.
