: Candid Color Systems :

In 2002, Eric Kromps and Karl Schmudlach formed Hotshot Imaging near Sacramento, California. They began the business with a focus on the white water rafting that is popular around Lotus, but soon realized that they needed a less seasonal market, one with growth potential. With Eric's business acumen and Karl's photography skills, they began a push to incorporate youth sports photography as a market that they would serve.

The opportunity in the youth sports market was tremendous, but they recognized that they needed a strong lab to grow their business the way they envisioned. In order to do that, Hotshots needed to conduct business online in order to streamline the process, workflow and systems without hiring more staff. Although the pre-pay marketing method had been their business model since the beginning, they saw online images with emails as the way to get from one point to another.

The Challenge

Hotshots began to recognize that the prepay method of photography was a labor intensive process that took time away from cultivating new business or scheduling additional shoot days. "Prepay is a process that is layered with distribution forms, data entry, handling of cash, and several details that need follow-up when mistakes take place", said Eric Kromps, President. "When a parent gives you a $30 check and orders $40 worth of product, the follow up to fix the error in their math is a nightmare." Karl Schumbach, General Manager, adds, "I've had a three inch stack of checks and cash that take me longer to fill out the bank deposit form than it did to actually have the picture day. We really needed a more streamlined process for our business."

After exhaustive research, Karl and Eric chose Candid Color Systems to handle all their lab work, order entry and backend software and technology.

The Solution

Candid Color Sports was the overriding solution with their ViewFirst® method of shooting for several reasons. Eric saw Candid as a way to begin thinking about more than one league at a time and grow the business. He wanted to get out of the business of having 3 people spend all day on Monday after shoot day doing order entry and follow up. Instead of passing out envelopes and doing data entry, Hotshots now passes out webcards and collects email addresses, so that when pictures are ready, it’s a simple email out to everyone letting them know to view their photos.

ViewFirst® also allows customers to view all the options and lets them make the image choice for their photos, a huge competitive advantage that parents, coaches and leagues love. With pre-pay, you are reliant on the photographer to choose which photo is best, and with hundreds of photos to choose from on any given weekend, that can become a cumbersome job. ViewFirst also allows the customer to input the information, eliminating difficult handwriting to read and decipher and more time on staff to complete a job.

There were other reasons that Candid rose to the top of the competition of photography labs: turnaround time and delivery options. “There are some photographers who wouldn’t have the pictures to customers until after the season is over”, said Karl. “Everyone likes to shoot on opening day. But let’s face it, you can only shoot so many teams in a given timeframe, and ViewFirst allows you to spread out the schedule because turnaround is so quick. This, coupled with the option of delivering it straight to the customer’s home, frees us up from the administrative headache of order distribution to concentrate on our core business.”

The Results:

-Grown from 1,000 kids to 15,000 kids photographed
-Taken the business from pre-pay envelope method to Candid Color Sports ViewFirst method, where all photos are posted online for ease of ordering.
-Reduced the amount of time spent on data entry after a shoot day by 50%

Candid Color Systems offers great tools for pre-paid and speculation sports programs. We offer online proofing, online ordering, order envelopes, password cards, mailing direct to your end customer, software to print paper proofs, an amazing array of sports products, photographer order entry and over 30 years of photography experience!

For help or questions, please call Brian Speers at 800-336-4550, Ext. 251, or Dan Hays at Ext. 227.