My new brand and website are LIVE!

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I can barely put together words to explain just how excited I am! This project has been in the works for months. You could even go as far as to say that it’s been years in the making… my dreams of a new site and brand truly began in early 2018 when I knew we’d be moving across the country. I knew I’d have to, in ways, start my business over since I didn’t have many connections to the wedding industry at my new home base. I wanted to introduce myself to Milwaukee in the best way possible! So at that point, I planned to redesign it all on my own and gave myself three months to create some magic!…

Well, during those three months before our move, my life consisted of the following:

• six weddings
• 20 photo sessions
• selling my house in Kansas (and keeping it clean for showings)
• finding a new house in Wisconsin
• Matt in Wisconsin Mon-Fri, in Kansas Fri-Sun (solo parent days, whoop!)
• working from home with a 2 year old and 9 month old
• emotionally preparing to leave the people we loved dearly
• packing what we’d take with us to live with my mom for three months, while everything else went into storage

So, rebranding JWild Photography and creating a new website quickly got shoved to the bottom of my to-do list… I thought, “well, maybe once we move I can rebrand”… so we moved, but theeeennnn the next three months came:

• traveling back to Kansas twice a month for weddings
• gutting and renovating our new house 
• trying to make connections in Milwaukee while living an hour south
• moving out of my mom’s house and into our new house
• attempting my hand at graphic design and hating everything I created

So again, a true rebrand never occurred.

I officially introduced JWild Photography to Milwaukee in January of 2019 with my old logo and with a meh website. Sidenote: I still love my old logo and will forever be thankful to Carrie at Sparrow Lettering for making it for me back in 2016.

Now, fast forward to November of 2019 when I attended The Heart University Workshop in Seattle, Washington (post coming on this experience soooooon!). The hosts, Evie and Lindsey really helped me see the value in creating a brand that screamed me and investing in a bomb designer. So I went home and decided that during my 2020 slow season (January-March), it was finally time TO DO THE DAMN THING and hire a professional to completely reface JWild Photography.

Side Note: I always preach about hiring a professional photographer to take your photos, so why didn’t I just hire a professional web designer/brander to make a website for me from the very beginning?! Why did it take going to The Heart Workshop for me to finally GET IT?! A couple of years after I started my business, I hired someone to create something amazing for me. I paid a good chunk of money, and well, let’s just say the final product was complete crap. I hated it. It was amateur looking and just a pile of garbage. I then tried to create my own site with the little knowledge I had of design. It looked better than the one I paid to have created for me, so I just went with it for years. Overall, I had a bad taste in my mouth from that outsourcing experience.

So as I began my journey of [finally] finding someone to hire, I struggled to feel confident in the people I found. Again, probably just a lot of doubt from my past experience. THEN COVID hit… damn covid… and I became overwhelmed with life, so guess what? I pushed my search to the side, yet again.

*Face palm*

Then one random April day, a photographer friend of mine, Christina, whom I had met at The Heat Workshop, posted her new website. IT WAS PERFECT. Christina’s site SCREAMED her. It was a visual representation of who she was as a person, her photography and who she desired to serve. I was in LOVE with it and immediately felt I had to chat with her designer. So I did some social media stalking and started following her designer, Chloe, the owner of Wonder Creative.

After a couple of weeks of creeping, I FINALLY REACHED OUT and we set up a Zoom call. You guys… within TWO MINUTES I just knew that Chloe was exactly who I needed in my life! I had not felt that about ANY designer up to that point, so I had to just go with my gut! After our hour long chat, I told her to just take all my money so she could get to work!

To be continued…

Stay tuned for PART 2, as I share about the process, the ideas behind my brand and why we chose the things we did.