How to Build a Profitable Birth Photography Business with Tavia Redburn
Have you ever considered adding birth photography to your doula toolkit to enhance your clients' experience (and increase your income)?
If you are ready to learn how to integrate birth photography into your doula practice and take your business to the next level, then get out a pen and paper, this episode is for you!
In Episode 55 of the Birthworker Podcast, I'm joined by Tavia Redburn from The Beauty in Birth who is sharing her insight and experience from paving the way in the early days of birth photography, all the way to now coaching new and aspiring birth photographers to have sustainable photography businesses that allow them to quit their day jobs! (Sounds like me, right?!)
In this episode, we dive into the following:
How incorporating photography into your doula practice can benefit both you and your clients…
The most common struggle that takes new birth photographers by surprise…
Why learning birth photography is the missing piece to your doula business puzzle…
… and a whole lot more!
If you’re tired of struggling to turn your passion for photography into a profitable business, then you wanna listen up!
Kyleigh Banks: Thank you so much for being here, Tavia. I'm super excited to hear your business birth story is what we call them here. I got that from Nicole Black. She's amazing. Let's start by just hearing who you are, what you do now, and then we'll dive into your entire journey.
Tavia Redburn: Yeah, awesome. I'm so excited to be here. So my name is Tavia Redburn and I am a birth and newborn photographer in Oklahoma City. I have a certification program for birth photographers. I teach birth photographers in a marketing school for photographers. That’s how I was able to go full-time in 2018 with photography and retire with my husband at the age of 32. So I'm really excited to be here.
Kyleigh Banks: I'm so excited. I love that our stories are a little bit similar. I'm just absolutely obsessed with that. So I actually met you through our business coaches. I actually remember very clearly, I think Amy Porterfield and James Wedmore both have you on their sales pages. And so I remember seeing you around. Amy would talk about you in her podcast too, and I just remember hearing... This was back with baby Kyleigh. I didn't have any students, clients, nothing like that. But I just remember thinking, "Oh my God, someone else in the birth community is doing what I want to do" and it just gives me hope. So thank you for giving me hope.
Tavia Redburn: Oh, I didn't know that. That's so cool. Yeah, when you hear somebody in those big coaches when they say something about birth, you're like, "What? Wait, what?"
Kyleigh Banks: 100%. Okay, I want to hear, did you start photography as a newborn and birth photographer? I want to hear kind of what that journey was like.
Tavia Redburn: Yeah, so I actually did not. I started out like a lot of moms in 2009, 2010, that's when DSLRs came on the scene. So for the non-photographers and the audience, that's just basically when digital cameras became a thing and you weren't relying on film anymore. So all these moms had DSLRs and they were taking photos for $50 all over the place and "ruining" the photography industry.
That was me. I was like, I love taking photos. I can make a little money on the side. I had a baby at the time. And so I just started taking photos for people for fun and to make a little bit of extra money and more people started saying like, "Hey, will you take my daughter's senior photos?" Or, "Will you take our family photos?" Or, "Will you take our newborn photos?" And so I was kind of getting hired for random jobs. I had no real intention of starting a photography business. It was just kind of doing it for extra money and to practice because they loved photography. So that's how I got started with photography.
Kyleigh Banks: Did you say you had kids at that point already?
Tavia Redburn: I did, yeah. I had my oldest who was born in 2008, so he was a baby at the time.
Kyleigh Banks: Okay, exciting. That's really cool. Okay. When did you actually start taking yourself seriously, like "Wait, this is actually a business. I'm going to actually make some money with this"?
Tavia Redburn: Yeah, man, I always go back to kind of my big turning point was in 2011. I was pregnant with my second son. I was planning a VBAC. Your audience is very familiar with that. Normally, I have to explain what VBAC is. I was planning a VBAC. I hired a birth photographer, which was very unknown. This is 2011, birth photography was just not a thing. But I was in a photography world, I knew it was a thing so I hired a doula and then a separate birth photographer. I was induced at 42 weeks. We could have a whole conversation about birth stories.
I was induced at 42 weeks on a Monday morning, and he wasn't born until Tuesday evening. When I started pushing, my husband called her to come, the birth photographer, and she said she didn't have childcare because she thought I was being induced on Monday. And that was when she had her childcare and she basically wasn't going to come because she didn't have anybody to keep her kids.
So I looked up at my husband and I was just like, "I don't even care." I was happy to be having a VBAC. I was happy I was pushing. I was like, "I don't even care, whatever." My doula was there and took some photos. And it wasn't until after, a couple of days after that it sunk in and I was just like, "I will never get these moments back." I'll never have photos of my VBAC-I-did-it moment, because I hired somebody who wasn't committed to being a birth photographer.
She didn't really know what all was involved, which is being on call and being there for your clients. And so once that happened, my photography business really shifted into baby and birth and newborn and I wanted to photograph birth. I was like, "I want to be somebody that people can rely on. I want to give it a shot." And so in 2012, I photographed my very first birth and I was instantly hooked. I was like this, if I could only do one thing, it would be birth photography. I was obsessed with it.
Kyleigh Banks: That's amazing. And so what was the on-call lifestyle for you with two at home, two little kids at home?
Tavia Redburn: Yeah, it was a nice break. I'm going to be honest, it was a nice break. It was like, "Oh, I get to go be with adults and take photos." It didn't feel stressful. It didn't feel like a lot of work. It was like, "Okay, great. I get to go do this now." I have really reliable on-call childcare, which is super helpful. My husband could leave his job if he needed to come home. We have family nearby. So the on-call childcare part wasn't ever really a big issue for me. And I actually liked being on-call. I liked the general adrenaline rush of getting the call that I got to go to a birth.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah, I absolutely feel that too. There's just something so special about leaving your house in the middle of the night looking up at the stars and knowing that a baby's going to be born pretty soon. It's really, really special.
Tavia Redburn: Yeah, it's so fun.
Kyleigh Banks: All right, so what happened after that? You pivoted and you only did birth photography, newborn, maternity, that kind of stuff?
Tavia Redburn: Yeah, so I was still photographing newborns, but I realized that once I really niched down to birth photography, once people knew me for that, it became so much easier to get clients, because before then I was very much like a discount photographer, "Here's all the images on CD." That's what we did back then. I'm old. That's just what we did.
And so that was the trajectory. But once this happened with birth photography, people started to come to me and be like, "I know you're a birth photographer.” This was the first time anyone knew anything about me, was because I was standing out by niching down into something that was so specific and different at the time.
And so then I started unknowingly niching down. People weren't talking about niching down back then. But I just sort of unknowingly niche down to birth photography and started showing more birth images, talking more about birth on social media, connecting with other birth workers like doulas and midwives and going to birth worker meetups and stuff like that. I kind of became known as the birth photographer in Oklahoma City.
And so booking clients became so much easier because people knew me for something. I wasn't blending in with all of the other $50 DSLR moms "ruining" the photography industry. I'm doing air quotes by the way. I was known for something, and that was birth photography. So that was an incredible way for me to stand out.
Kyleigh Banks: Okay. I have to ask you, could you just be a photographer with a camera and all of a sudden you're good at birth photography too? Or is birth photography like its own beast where you kind of have to understand something more than just how to take pictures?
Tavia Redburn: It's definitely its own beast. There are so many unknowns with birth photography. And doulas know this. There's so many lighting changes you don't know. Even if they're planning a home birth, it doesn't mean they're necessarily going to be giving birth at home. Or if they're planning a vaginal birth, it doesn't mean they're necessarily going to be having... So you really have to be on your toes for so many reasons. You don't know how long you're going to be there.
I'm preaching to the choir here with doulas. But you don't know how long you're going to be there. It was so different than any other genre of photography, but I didn't care because I was just obsessed with it and it just didn't feel like work. Being there for 12 hours wasn't a big deal to me because I loved it.
Navigating the tech challenges with my camera was an issue. I had a very entry-level camera and I quickly started to realize my limitations. And so I just poured myself into learning everything I possibly could about low light photography, about using on-camera flash, about just lighting. Lighting is the biggest challenge in birth photography. I just kind of learned online through forums, self-taught and through experience because people were booking me because I was known as the birth photographer.
Kyleigh Banks: At what point did other photographers start coming to you and asking you like, "Tavia, tell me all of your secrets. I need to know how to do what you're doing"?
Tavia Redburn: I would say it was three or four years down the road, I would have photographers be like... And even doulas that I worked with often or I would go to a birth with or whatever, they're like, "It seems like you stay so busy. How do you stay so busy?" And I would tell them a few things here and there. People would DM me like, "Hey, I want to get into photography. How did you very first find your clients?"
People were just asking me questions like that, and I thought, "I'm kind of saying the same things over and over to these people that are reaching out to me. I'm telling them kind of the same things. I wonder if I could start a group of people who are all interested in learning birth photography, maybe marketing," because I'm a big giant business and marketing nerd. I love data. I love analyzing things. I love business. I love talking about marketing strategy, and I've always been that way. So when people were like, "Hey, will you talk to us about this?" I was like, "Yeah."
So I started a free Facebook group, this is probably 2015 when Facebook groups were all the rage, and just got a few hundred people that had been asking me about photography and birth photography together and just started sharing free information. Just started being like, "Hey, here's something I learned. Here's a tip. Here's a way I just booked a client." I just started giving value like crazy because again, just with birth photography, it was really fun for me to talk about marketing and business. And so I just created an environment in that Facebook group where we could do that.
Kyleigh Banks: Ah, I'm obsessed with that. You know what? I work with doulas of course so I see a lot of different types of people, and I really don't think there are so many people who love that business side also. And if they do, I think they have found me because in the big picture, I would say maybe half of my students really love that business side too. But when I zoom out and I look at all birth workers in general, birth is so feminine and flowy and spiritual. A lot of times we see business as something that's just really hard and masculine and numbers and whatnot. I actually don't think business has to be that way at all, but it's really cool.
I get a lot of pushback when new doulas come to me and think about things like, "Oh, really? I should probably start an email list? Ugh, that sounds gross. I hate getting emails. I don't want to email other people." I love to open their mind of what's actually possible through business. Like, do you want to serve more moms or not? Because this is the way to freaking do it. And if you really want to serve more moms, if you want to grow your impact, sometimes it's worth doing something that's a little uncomfortable for yourself so you can serve more women.
I think in the process, a lot of people actually do fall in love with having their own business. And if it's not the number stuff like us, because I'm the same, anyone in my program knows I love Google Sheets, I love automations, I love Zapier and Airtable and all the things, but it really doesn't have to be that way either. But if you do fall in love with it, you can build this legacy. And you can build a legacy not only for your community but for your family too. It doesn't have to be like this bro marketing hard sales scammy type of thing. So I absolutely love that. I love to hear what you're doing.
Tavia Redburn: Yeah, it was really fun. It was really just starting to... I knew that if I wanted to sell something at some point, I had to build an audience of people who were interested in this. My audience on Instagram, my email list, all of that was all photography clients. And so it's like, "Okay, well if someday..." I had no idea what that looked like, but I was like, "If someday I ever want to have this as another business or a branch of my photography business, I need to build an audience of people who want to learn from me." And so sort of the intention was like, yes, to answer their questions and to have fun, but also to strategically start to think, "Okay, how can I build an audience of people who want to learn from me?"
Kyleigh Banks: Ugh. I'm obsessed with that. That vision, forecasting and long-term vision is so huge. It's really important. I forget who told me this, but CEOs, they work in 12 months. They're always thinking 12 months from now. When you're getting started, you're thinking about, "What is my to-do list? What needs to happen today?" But as you grow and really step into that CEO role, it's way more what needs to happen today, and so 12 months from now, XYZ can happen. I love that.
Okay. I want to hear real quick, did you ever become too busy that you were turning people away? What did that look like? Did you raise your prices? Maybe how many births were you doing photography for at the height of your business? And then what are you doing now because now you have a lot more other things going on in your business too?
Tavia Redburn: Yeah, I did start turning people away. So funny story, I was charging $850, this was probably 2014. I had probably photographed 20 or 30 births at that point. I met someone who was brand new and was charging the same as me. And I thought, "Oh..." It was a strange realization. I hope this doesn't sound arrogant, it's not my intention, but I had definitely had the most experience in my community with birth photography at that time and I realized people are coming to my price point and stopping other photographers because that was the cap in their mind.
It's like, "Okay, this is the highest that I can charge." And so it was then that I was like, "I wonder if I should raise my prices and just see what happens." And it was so scary. I know that doulas can relate to this. Whenever it comes to raising your prices, it's like, "But what if nobody books me at that price? What am I going to do? Am I going to just lower my prices?"
But I was booked and I was staying booked, and so I raised my prices by 40% and I jumped to $1,250 from $850. Something mentally about jumping over $1,000 was just so stressful for me, but I was like, "Okay, I was booked for the rest of the year," and I was like, "Worst case scenario, I raised my prices for the following year. Nobody books it. Nobody ever has to know this happened. I'll lower them back down." That was my mindset. I was like, "Okay."
So my very first inquiry after I raised my prices to $1,250, booked my highest package, which was $1,850 and paid a $200 travel fee because she was two hours away from me. So I made almost $2,000 from the very first person after I raised my prices. And that was such incredible validation for me to go like, "Okay, people are willing to pay this." I'm in Oklahoma City, not a huge market. The Bible belt, I'm talking about birth photography here. People are like, "Wait, what?" I had to explain to people what this even is, and now I'm charging $2,000 for birth photography? It seemed crazy, but it was all working.
And so what happened that year, which I think was 2015, is I booked the most births that I had ever booked at that higher price point. It was being higher priced that attracted people. That was a marketing strategy. That was a strategy that I hadn't ever considered. And every time I raise my prices after that, I would book the same number of clients or more. And so I think that we have a lot of fear around raising our prices, but when you raise your prices, you're telling people like, "I'm valuable. I'm worth this price. I'm worth more than this price." And people can feel that. They're like, "Okay, well, she must be good, she's the most expensive. Or she's charging $1,500, $1,800, $2,000, whatever."
So I don't know if that answered your question. That was kind of a sidebar about pricing and all of that. The following year, 2016, I was booking like 25-ish births a month. I think my busiest year was 2019, and we photographed 30 births. Here's what I mean by we. 2018, I was turning people away. It was killing me because I was like, I just can't take any more birth clients. And so I was sending them to my friend Stephanie.
Eventually, Stephanie came to me and we had been talking about this, and she's like, "I'm not a huge fan of the marketing stuff. I don't really like the marketing. I just want to take photos." And I was like, "Well, my education business is starting to do well, and I would like to spend more time and attention there. So what would it look like for us to collaborate?" So she came on my team as pretty much the exclusive birth photographer in 2019. I photographed... I don't know the number. I photographed a small percentage of the births in 2019, and she photographed a majority of them.
It was incredible because it was like I still got to photograph birth, but it gave me the time and attention to focus on building my online business. So yes, I got to a point where I was fully booked and brought somebody else on my team, which was fantastic at the time.
Kyleigh Banks: I'm obsessed with that. What does your team look like now?
Tavia Redburn: So now Stephanie doesn't work with me anymore. I am not accepting birth clients right now because I'm just obsessed with my online businesses. It's like this passion that I had in 2009 learning photography. And in 2011, being at births didn't feel like work, that's how I feel about my online businesses now.
I am obsessed with helping photographers go full-time because there's this stigma, and I'm sure that you've faced this too, and your audience understands, there's this attitude that doula work and photographers make side income or extra money or vacation money or whatever. And because I was able to make a full-time income with photography, it became this passion and need to show other moms that they can also make a full-time income with photography. Whether that means leaving their full-time job, or retire a spouse like I did, it's like I just wanted to show people that that was possible and how I was able to do it.
And so that was lighting me up so much that I had to let a lot of the photography stuff go. And so I am not taking new birth clients. I'm still doing some portrait clients, but I'm not actively promoting photography at all. The people that come to me are people repeats or people who have been following me for a long time. So I'm 99% in working on the online businesses at this point.
Kyleigh Banks: Oh, I'm obsessed with that. Do you have any online offerings that serve the regular population or is it all serving photographers?
Tavia Redburn: The regular population.
Kyleigh Banks: The normal people.
Tavia Redburn: It's all serving photographers. It's all about how to learn to photograph birth. And then once you know that, how to get booked and actually find the clients that are willing to pay your prices.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah. Okay. Absolutely. This is totally on a tangent, and you're not prepared to answer this, I don't think, but I know you're going to answer it really well. And the same thing happens with doulas when someone hires a doula and sometimes that doula absolutely completely lets that mom down.
I know the same happens with birth photography, just like you said with your second birth with a photographer literally just not coming. "Your induction was yesterday, I'm not coming." It's like, "What?" So is that something that you kind of talk about in any of your offers too, or maybe on your podcast of how to actually serve clients really well?
Tavia Redburn: Yeah. I think that for photographers and doulas too, it's all about communication. It's all about over-communicating because there are so many unknowns with birth photography. And so every step of the way, really communicating to them, "Here's kind of our plan." And COVID taught us this for sure. "Here's kind of our plan. Here's our plan B if that doesn't work out. Here's our plan C if that doesn't work out. If I can't be at your birth, if Stephanie can't be at your birth, here's what that looks like." And really overcommunicating.
I think that sometimes birth workers shy away from that a little bit because we want our clients to be happy, and so we don't want to talk about the bad stuff. Maybe it's just photographers. We don't want to talk about if you're planning a VBAC, but you have a repeat C-section. We don't want to talk about if you're planning a home birth, but you end up going to the hospital. But I have those conversations with my clients because briefly, as a VBAC mom myself, I understand the mental stuff that goes into that.
But I over communicate with them what to expect and what will happen if things don't go the way that we planned, because I don't want them to have something happen and go, "Well, she didn't tell me what would happen if this happened." I want to have had those conversations ahead of time, so they're like, "Oh, well, I'm having a C-section. This is what Tavia said would happen. This and this." Does that answer your question? Is that the direction you were going?
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah. Absolutely. I love that.
Tavia Redburn: Okay.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah, the communication. Communication solves so many issues in so many different ways, so I love that. Yeah.
Tavia Redburn: Yeah. I always tell my students, disappointment is usually unmet expectations. So whenever your client is disappointed about something or whenever I have a student who's disappointed about something, I'm always looking at myself and my team to say, "Okay, where did we drop the ball here? Where did they potentially not get the information they needed? Because they're disappointed about something." And to me, 9 times out of 10, it's a communication issue. They didn't understand something. Not always, but 90% of the time I would say it's me looking at myself.
Kyleigh Banks: Ugh. I'm obsessed with that. Okay. Do you have any final tips? Because most people listening to this podcast, they're already doulas or starting to get into the doula world, but I know there are some who are also interested in photography. So is it possible to do both doula work and photography work? Do you have any tips? And then how could you maybe potentially help those people inside your programs?
Tavia Redburn: Yeah, it's definitely possible. Tips for photographing birth, I think that if you're a doula and you're interested in offering birth photography, I would bring a camera with you to your birth and just have that conversation with these clients and say, "Hey, I'm thinking about getting into birth photography. Do you mind if I take some photos at your birth?" and start practicing with these clients you already have.
As a doula, you have that advantage to where the birth photographers I work with typically are coming from a portrait photography background and they don't have the birth clients. You have the incredible advantage of, you've already got some birth clients, so it's like, "Hey, can I snap some photos at your birth?"
And the main issue, and we kind of talked about this earlier, is lighting when it comes to birth. So I would look at, "How can I practice in my house? How can I turn the lights down and get the atmosphere to feel kind of like a birth?" and take photos of my kids' doll or of a book or whatever, and try to just familiarize yourself with what it feels like to take photos in low light.
Because a lot of times we're taking photos outside where there's lots of light and things are easier. In a darker birth situation, it's much more challenging. So lighting and also focal points. What are you taking a photo of? Is it sharpen and focus? And if not, do you know how to fix that? So those are the two big mistakes that I see birth photographers making. Practicing at home is really, really going to help you with that.
And yeah, I would love to connect with you if you have more questions. I have a YouTube channel. I haven't updated it in a hot minute, but there's some really good content on there that teaches you how to photograph birth in low light. So kind of some of the things that I was talking about here today. You can just search The Beauty in Birth on YouTube and find it. Or that Facebook group that I talked about earlier, it still exists. And so there's photographers and doulas there all the time just sharing tips on, yes, taking photos, but also the marketing side and all that good stuff.
Kyleigh Banks: That's one of my favorite parts about you, is that you teach not only how to actually be a good birth photographer and take the pictures and do the lighting and all that, but how to actually market yourself. And so I'm like the parallel for birth doulas. So I teach the birth theory and how to actually be a doula and when to go to the birth and how to support, but also how to market yourself.
Because if we're not making this a sustainable business and if we're not getting paid for our time, we're just going to burn out and stop doing it. And if it's a passion of ours, photography is a huge passion, birth is a huge passion, we want to make sure that we're going to be doing this for decades to come. So I'm absolutely obsessed. I'm going to put the links to all of that in the show notes. And yeah, thank you so much for being here.
Tavia Redburn: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Kyleigh Banks: Awesome.
thank you for listening
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Meet your host, Kyleigh Banks, a side-gig doula turned CEO of a multi-six-figure birth-focused business. Her passion? Teaching birth nerds, like you, how to build an incredibly successful doula business that allows you to quit your day job, stay home with your kids, and most importantly, make a lasting impact on the world.