Christmas sessions: Joanie Dachy's method for making them half your year

"Talent isn't everything." Those are Joanie Dachy's words, after twenty years in photography and ten years running Colors & Drops, the leading photo backdrop shop in France. Her full sentence: "I understood that talent wasn't everything, and that the more organised you are, the more you multiply your revenue." Coming from a photographer who has trained more than a hundred fellow photographers, it's worth stopping to listen.

Colors & Drops turns ten this month. Behind the brand is a path that starts a long way from newborns: trained in food and advertising photography, Joanie moved into portraits, found herself "doing a bit of everything", and specialised in newborn photography almost without noticing. It was her best friend who pointed it out: "Well, you're a newborn photographer, basically." Then, unable to find quality backdrops, she made her own. A fellow photographer pushed her for two years before she took the plunge. The rest is a company that today equips photographers across the whole country.

This episode of the Fotostudio podcast isn't a victory lap, it's a toolbox. Here's what to take away if you make your living from photography.

1. Embody your brand, or vanish into the price

Joanie's first observation is brutal: your clients can't tell you apart from another photographer. Faced with two offers that look alike, they decide on the one criterion left, price. The only defence is you.

Most photographers hide behind the lens for fear of being judged. But that judgement, she points out, mostly comes from the people around you, family and friends, who are precisely not your clientele. Not showing who you are means condemning yourself to a price war: "If you don't brand yourself and you don't show who you are, who you embody, the values you hold, you can't convert people."

The corollary, and she owns it: you won't appeal to everyone, and that's for the better. Pushing a few away is how you attract the right ones.

She's the first to admit she doesn't always take her own medicine: "Do as I say, not as I do." The candour is part of the message.

2. Creativity, your only real edge

At a time when AI is putting creativity within everyone's reach, Joanie makes it her absolute leitmotif: "Creativity has to be the golden word, the leitmotif. It does everything, really."

Hence her most vivid metaphor, the photo backdrop as a skeleton. A backdrop isn't the finished set, it's a base to dress up.

Your work starts there: adding props, real objects, texture, to build a world and spark interaction. When it's done well, she says, "the photo takes itself", you become a spectator of a moment you're immortalising. Her concrete advice: offer at least three settings per session, one of them very simple and timeless. More variety means more images sold and a clearly higher average order value.

3. Christmas: half your year in three months

This is the heart of the episode. Christmas sessions (the famous "mini sessions", a term Joanie actually rejects: "it's not mini, it's maxi") can account for half, or even more, of your annual revenue. She compares it to a surf school on the coast: you work flat out in July and August because that's when everything happens.

The most important message fits in one line: talk about your Christmas sessions all year round. And, Joanie adds, to everyone. To every client from her very first session, but also to your baker, to the schoolteacher, to anyone who'll listen. Human word of mouth is still the best marketing, and always will be.

Her distinction between stories and reels is worth its weight in gold. Stories are ephemeral, speak to the people who already follow you, and are made to sell (reminder: few of your followers see every story, so you repeat yourself). Reels, on the other hand, show the behind the scenes and the preparation to the wider audience. And on payment, her rule is firm: session paid in full, in advance. A no-show who only paid a deposit is a loss; a no-show who paid nothing is worse.

4. Your best clients are the ones you already have

Bringing an existing client back costs infinitely less than finding a new one. Hence Joanie's VIP system: opening Christmas bookings first to her VIPs, meaning anyone who has come at least once. The system was born "on instinct", and that's exactly her regret: she wishes she'd been more rigorous and got organised sooner.

One anecdote says everything about the volume: on a VIP launch day, she sends her announcements out by email, text and Facebook group from her work phone. The replies pour in so fast that the iPhone speaker eventually burns out. Her half-serious conclusion: centralise your client communications in a proper tool, rather than sacrificing your phone to them.

5. Small budget, small space? There's a solution for everything

The best proof that simplicity works is her. She shot her first Christmas sessions in her own living room: furniture moved outside, a beige backdrop she already owned, a cheap throw, two or three baubles. Two setups, one of them deliberately light and low-cost as a contrast to the more elaborate one.

The two real constraints, budget and space, each have their workaround. You can build two sets in a small space: one you invest in, plus a very light setup. And you activate your network: your parents' house, a friend's bigger place, a barn depending on your region, or a partnership with a local business. A session held in a clothing shop brings footfall to the store: everybody wins.

Her antidote to early discouragement is just as blunt: never compare your year one to a fourteen-year career.

6. Paper, pencil, and a bit of courage

Before any tool, Joanie prescribes a sheet of paper and a pen: put down in black and white what you really want, how many sessions, how many sets, what budget, then reorganise. Her current trick: photograph that messy brainstorm, hand it to an AI and ask it to "reorganise your brain" into a step-by-step action plan. Because, as she sums it up, "if you don't know what you want, you don't move in the right direction".

And above all, dare. Her entire career is made of doors pushed open: the Facebook message sent one evening that became a partnership lasting several years, the fellow photographer who pushed her to create Colors. Talking to people changes lives, literally.

Conclusion: the job is behind the lens

Deep down, everything Joanie says converges on one idea: your job isn't in front of the computer, it's behind the lens, with people. The rest, the invoicing, the deposits, the follow-ups, the multichannel communications, deserves to be automated so there's time left for it. "Where we gain time is behind the lens and not necessarily in front of the computer. It's when we're with people, when we create memories, when we immortalise."