Why We're Teaching Brands to Create Their Own Content In-House

We've always believed that if you want to survive in business, you have to be willing to pivot. You have to be willing to move with whatever is happening in the world, rather than dig your heels in and hope things go back to how they were. That belief is exactly why we've started teaching brands how to do their own photography in-house.

What we're seeing

More and more brands are pulling their content creation in-house. They want to be hands-on, more resourceful, and more in control of what they produce. A lot of that comes down to the current climate. With the ongoing cost of living and tighter budgets everywhere, brands are looking hard at where their money goes, and they're realising they can build more of their content capability internally.

We had a choice. We could see that shift as a threat to a production agency like ours, or we could lean into it. We chose to lean in. If brands are going to bring content in-house anyway, we'd much rather be the people who teach them to do it, and to do it properly.

Why "properly" matters so much to us

We've spent years building content that helps brands generate millions. We know exactly how much craft sits behind a single image that actually converts. So the thing we genuinely don't want to see is a brand bringing content in-house and watching it flop, simply because nobody showed them how to use the gear or the lighting.

Teaching them properly protects the work. It means a brand can shoot internally and still hit a standard that does their products justice, instead of producing content that quietly undersells everything they've built.

It's an opportunity for photographers too

There's another side to this that we're really excited about, and it's about photographers.

Running a photography business is a challenge in its own right. The shooting is the passion, but the business around it, the advertising, the marketing yourself, the constant hustle for the next client, is a completely different job. Not every photographer wants that. Some just want to be a photographer and have a stable role doing what they love.

Brands building content teams in-house creates exactly those roles. It opens up real job opportunities for photographers to work within a marketing team, do great creative work, and not have to carry the weight of running a business at the same time. That's a genuinely good thing for our industry.

Our first brand workshop

We ran our very first brand workshop with York Street Brands in Sydney. They're the team behind tbh Skincare, Boost Lab, and Bouf, so they understand content and they understand selling product.

Working with a brand of that calibre as our first was the perfect proof of concept. It showed us that there's real appetite for this, and that teaching brands to create properly is something we can do brilliantly.

Where this is heading

This is a direction we're fully committed to. The world is changing, brands are changing with it, and we'd rather help shape that shift than resist it. Teaching brands to create great content in-house, and creating new opportunities for photographers along the way, feels like exactly the right place for us to be.

If you're a brand thinking about bringing your content in-house, we'd love to show you how to do it well.