Photo Studio Operations Live! with David Hice

Full episode transcript

Daniel Jester:
From Creative Force, I'm Daniel Jester. And this is the eCommerce content creation podcast.
Daniel Jester:
On May 4th, 2022. The eCommerce content creation podcast was recorded in front of a live audience at Photo Studio Operations, 2022 in New York city, hosted by Henry Stewart Events. Recording an episode in front of a live audience is something we have wanted to do since virtually day one of this show. And this event in New York was the perfect opportunity. David Hice of Aritzia joins me for a second round as a guest, and we dig a little deeper into some of the topics from his first episode, as well as take audience questions. I don't think we need an intro quote for this episode. I think we're just going to dig right in. So let's go
Daniel Jester:
This is the eCommerce content creation podcast. I am your host, Daniel jester, and I am excited to be sitting in a room full of a bunch of beautiful faces. People from the industry at the Henry Stewart Photo Studio operations event here in New York city. My guest for this very special, we call it a live episode. We just clarified off the record before we started recording that we're not pushing this out live, it's recorded in front of a live studio audience, the claps and the laughs that you hear are not audio tracks. They're real people. My guest today, David Hice of Aritzia. David, welcome back on the podcast.
David Hice:
Yeah, Daniel, thanks for having me back. I'm super excited to be here.
Daniel Jester:
So you are one of the select few who have been a repeat guest on this podcast, and I'll be sending you your decoder ring in the mail-
David Hice:
I didn't bring it with me-
Daniel Jester:
For that very exclusive club of which Claire Carter-Ginn belongs to. But we just released your episode yesterday on the podcast. Is anyone in the audience? First of all, do any of you guys listen to the podcast?
Daniel Jester:
Good. Okay. Having listened one time or regularly?
Speaker 4:
Regularly.
Daniel Jester:
All right. Very good. Appreciate-
David Hice:
I'll be regular going forward. I just have only listened to my own so far.
Daniel Jester:
David doesn't actually listen to the podcast
David Hice:
Only when I'm on it.
Daniel Jester:
So we had an incredible episode with you, David. We talked about the project manager's mindset for the studio, and we prefaced the conversation by saying that project management and studios have not always... It's not always been the strong suit of the studio team. A hallmark of creative production in the past has been emergencies and fires and people's hair on fire and running around and semi-organized chaos to get the things that we need. But as our industry has matured, as we have realized, so many of the speakers have said so far that we have a need for more content, faster, with less money. We have to adopt some things with the... Including the sort of project manager of mindset. And I'm apologizing. I'm not being rude you guys...
Daniel Jester:
I just, this is behind the scenes. You're seeing normally I'm sitting in my small studio without anybody watching me do this, but we have to take notes in order to have a good conversation on this podcast. Our editor does a good job of just making us sound very smart. So I need to turn my, I need to get to my notes here, but we wanted to dig in on some of the topics that we touched on in that episode. And I think one of the things I'd like to start with is knowing your KPIs. So that you can speak intelligently to the business. You want to take it from there?
David Hice:
Yeah. Well, I mean, just to touch on the part when you're talking about adopting this project management mindset for the studio, and I mentioned this on our last podcast, it's really adopting that project management mindset for whatever you're doing, obviously we're here to talk about the studio so that's what we're going to talk about. And KPI's being a big part of that. So how much can you get done in a day? How much can you get done in a specific bay, whether that's off-model on-model, this category, that category.
David Hice:
Knowing exactly what you're able to do as you go into that day is part of this whole project management mindset. Part of this whole, let's do all this upfront work, all this background work. So when we go into production, there isn't any surprises. So as you speak about, we need to be more efficient, we need to do things more quickly. What can we do upfront? What can we do behind the scenes? So when you have everybody come into the studio, we can get everything done.
Daniel Jester:
And it starts with pre-production. Getting everybody on the same page and having that knowledge of how much can we do? What is it that you're asking for? How can we apply that? And I wanted to ask you, how granular do you get with that? You personally, in your own studio. I know in my experience at past studios, we knew by brand that Oscar de la Renta that took longer for us to shoot than other brands. How do you deal with that at Aritzia?
David Hice:
Yeah. At Aritzia, it's still a work in progress, right? So it's a brand that is growing quickly. It's having a moment, we're expanding our categories. So it is somewhat of a work in progress. We have a general idea of what that is, and that continues to evolve as we evolve. Even from season to season, our art direction could change and that could impact the KPIs or we've moved studios the past three seasons. For example, they were shooting everything in their Vancouver studio prior to COVID, COVID happened, they're doing everything at home, sending product to models and to photographers. So that obviously drastically changes your KPIs when a pandemic happens or something like that you're not expecting. In the last couple of seasons, we've been trying to establish our New York photo studio so we can do all of our on model content here.
David Hice:
So going into a new space for fall winter last season, we had a general understanding of what our KPIs were, and that was up and down just based on the new space, not having the rock solid team they had back in Vancouver and New York when we were trying to fill in with freelancers.
David Hice:
We then moved again to another temporary studio. And there was, because we needed more space, we were trying to increase our KPIs, we were trying to have more consistent lighting. So for us right now, it's definitely a work in progress, but we want to get to a place where we are super granular. I think that's where we want to get. We want to know exactly this model, with this brand within Aritzia, in this category can do 45 looks, this and then repeat that for the next, for this category, this model can do 50 looks. This one can only do 25 or whatever it is we want to get there. So we're actively working on it. And I think that, again goes back to this whole pre-production project management mindset of knowing all of these things before you go into production. So there're less surprises when you're on set.
Daniel Jester:
And that helps you answer the question that comes up, which is why to reference Lauren's session. Why can't you add an extra detail shot?
David Hice:
Exactly.
Daniel Jester:
Why not?
David Hice:
Yeah.
Daniel Jester:
I'm asking you right now.
David Hice:
We probably can to be honest, but we don't want to just say that, right? We don't want to, we always want to... We don't want to over promise and under deliver. Right. So I think that's always something in the creative environment. I think everybody is so willing to do creative because that's what they're there to do, that's what they're there to love. So if someone from the business comes in and say, "Hey, can you do this?" The answer is almost always yes. So us as project managers, us as creative operations, us as producers kind to step in the middle and say, "That's not how we do things. But here is how we do things." So giving that visibility into the why. Here's what we can do. And here's the timeline we need to do it in. Here's what that looks like. That goes back to what we were just saying about breaking it down and here's everything we can do. Here's that at the granular level. Here's why we can or can't do something. So yeah.
Daniel Jester:
Yeah. And you brought up, I want to definitely touch on this idea of... I was listening to the episode that we recorded in preparation for today. And we talk a lot in this industry about breaking down silos between stakeholders and inputs and outputs for the studio. And I definitely think in most cases that is the right thing to do to increase communication, to make sure that our cross-functional partners understand what we do and we understand what they do and that we're fluent in those languages again, to reference Lauren...
Daniel Jester:
By the way, your session was incredible. I loved every slide. The slide that really stood out to me was where there was these questions. And then they morphed into what the actual question was. And that's an issue that we have is fluency. Being able to speak the languages of our stakeholders and understanding what they're truly actually asking for. But we need to let creative people be creative. And to some extent, we need to insulate them from these things. And that's where I think studio leadership becomes really important. The studio leadership, the mid-managers need to have that fluency, need to fight those battles, so to speak, to let the creatives actually do the work that they want to do and add value in that way. There's no value added in a photographer, a brilliant lead photographer sitting in a budget meeting.
David Hice:
Yeah. I think we spent a few minutes talking about this last time, right? So it's, how do set up the best process so that those creatives you hire can do the work they're hired to do. Whether it's a photographer or a stylist, like you said, there's no point in having them sit in these process meetings or budget meetings or anything like that. If you're able to come up with a process that... A seamless process that works for your studio and you hire specified creative individuals, they're going to do great work for you. As long as you can give them the time to do that, give them the tools to do that.
David Hice:
And I think one of the things that I'm super passionate about, and we spent a lot of time talking about on the podcast was not only just having that process, but having that process, having that fluency and bringing all of that into a sustainable cloud-based environment. Right? So something that, like I said, I'm super passionate about is getting this process into a space that it can scale, whether that's explosive growth like Aritzia doing well and we need to continue to keep up with the demand that we're seeing in the photo studio, or in times of scaling back. If your budget is cut, you want to put this process in a place and in a tool that allows you to scale whether that's up or down.
Daniel Jester:
Yeah. The technology becomes super important to help insulate those creatives in a lot of ways, because 10 years ago, I was shooting at Outlook and copying and pasting file names from an Excel spreadsheet, which is what every photographer dreams of doing when they go to photography school or art school or whatever they go on to do. And there are still studios out there, I'm sure that operate like that today. The difference is that social media has exploded. Social media isn't a singular marketing channel anymore. Every facet of social media is its own or TikTok is its own marketing channel. Is its own thing. And you need to be creating content for all of those things. So leveraging technology to help insulate, to some extent the creatives from having to do those manual processes and tasks and allowing them to just focus on creating.
Daniel Jester:
And that brings me to the next thing I wanted to talk about with you. It can sometimes be challenging to get certain... There are some photographers who are left-brain right-brain equal that I considered myself one of those. I'm very comfortable in Excel. I make fun of it a lot on the podcast, I actually really like it, but not everyone is like that. And one thing I've observed though is with photographers in particular, but I think a lot of roles in the studio, they have a really hard time understanding what is actually creative and what is technical. The camera that you use, emerging technology. You have photographers who were hesitant to go from a medium format with a phase one back to a 5D back in the day, you have photographers who are hesitant to go from a DSLR to a mirror-less. Those are all technical things. That's not actually adding any value to the creative. Speak to that. There was no question there. I just want to talk about this.
David Hice:
Well, we did touch on this before and I think it was fun to talk about. There's so much technology in a photo studio, right? We have highly specified people that are specific to some of that technology, but there is this general fear of new technology. I think everybody's comfortable with their piece of the photo studio. And when I talk about putting a process in a scalable tool that everybody can work in, all of a sudden, everyone has to kind of learn this new software, learn this new tool, and it may not be something that they're completely comfortable with. So there's that aspect of it. There's always that change management piece that we're working through. But I think once you're able to get everyone on board and have them working in this scalable environment, have them speaking the same language, that goes a long way and improving your efficiencies.
David Hice:
And then a point you just talked about is all these different channels that we now have to produce for, right? So every brand is essentially their own media company now. We're producing content, of course, in the photo studio for eCom, which is what we've been talking about a lot, but there's eCom, there's editorials, there's campaigns, there's all kinds of social media now, there's video content, which I know I am being asked for more and more from almost each one of those pillars, right? So it's not just video for social media, it's video for eCom, it's video for a campaign, it's video for all these different aspects of our creative. So that's part of-
Daniel Jester:
Yeah. It's just understanding, it's interesting idea to think about is we have to some... There's a hesitancy to let go of some of these semi-technical processes. And I think a lot of it boils down to there's a thinking sometimes, especially in an e-commerce product studio when you're not shooting a lot of editorial, that it isn't inherently creative work, and that's actually not true. You are creating, you are spending time, you're making a lot of decisions that... One of the things I think some creatives get a little bit hung up on is that they think also that the truly creative part is in the decision making. And so with product photography, that decision is made, those rails are set and you just stick to that. And that's where it sometimes feel...
Daniel Jester:
And so then they start to latch onto, "Well, I have to copy and paste file names because that's part of the process. That's part of my..." And I think we really need to do a better job of helping define what's technical, what's the truly creative part. How can we enhance the truly creative part for our teams, whether they're shooting still life, bathroom faucets, which is something that I did a lot in Amazon, thousands of them. But understanding the creative part is about building flexing that muscle and creating the most beautiful image of that dumb thing that you can make. It's not which button you push. It's not which platform that you're using and anything that we can do to minimize touch points to technology or failures of technology potentially, I think helps enhance that creative part of the process.
David Hice:
Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's what we've been talking about, right? So how do you take away? There's just some things you always do just because you've always done them. And then to a point, if you're in a place that is growing, those may now become roadblocks. So you want to constantly look at your process, constantly speak to those individuals throughout the process to truly understand their piece of it and truly understand why they're doing the things the way that they're doing them and take that, build that process and then put it into this environment that ultimately you can continue to grow in and remove some of those, "Oh, we've just always done it that way."
Daniel Jester:
How has your... I want to go back. I apologize for letting this slip by earlier, but you guys have changed studios three times.
David Hice:
Yeah. Yeah. That's, obviously COVID's been a curve ball for everybody. So when I joined the brand last June, they were still shooting everything. What we were calling eCom or we call it product catalog at home. So sending everything out to models or photographers to shoot either at their apartment or really wherever they could just to keep the website up. So when I joined the plan was, Okay, let's find a temporary space in New York prior to... At home they have a beautiful studio in Vancouver. I just visited a couple weeks ago and it's a fantastic studio office. Vancouver's beautiful too, if you haven't been, that was my first time.
David Hice:
But when the pandemic happened, the border was very much an issue. You can't fly in talent, you can't fly in models. So it was very hard on their previous process for eCom. So after at home, let's establish a something in New York, let's get a temporary photo studio up and running in New York. So when I joined, that's exactly what we did. We found a small space in New York City and then started shooting on model here for our fall winter 21 season.
David Hice:
That was successful enough to then say, okay, let's find another temporary space, a larger temporary space, which sounds easy, right." Hey, you did this once go ahead and do this again. Right? You found a temporary space on a month to month lease. That sounds reasonable. Go do that again just three times as big. So luckily we were able to do that and we are now I feel super successful in our process. And then the next step will be finding that longer term space, hopefully in New York. So we're looking to be here for the next five to 10 years and build out a semipermanent studio
Daniel Jester:
Here. And so how much of your production is it all moved into New York now? Or some of it's still happening in Vancouver?
David Hice:
All on model will be here. So we're going to keep off model in Vancouver for the time being. So we'll have that split. All corporate internal off model will stay in at Vancouver and then all on model and then certain editorials and campaigns and social content will be in New York.
Daniel Jester:
And this is another situation and there's tons of... I mean, this room is full of people who are operating studios in multiple cities. This is not a new thing at all. But this is one of the reasons that the technology that supports the studio can become so important. Because you... I've personally worked in situations where studios, independent studios for the same company were ran totally autonomously. Every studio had its own studio manager, its own budget making decisions. And I've worked in situations where one person oversaw multiple studios in multiple locations and there's pros and cons for both. But one of the challenges always is having that understanding of what's actually going on, how are we collecting KPIs? Are they accurate? And obviously the logistics of moving samples, we're not even really touch on samples.
David Hice:
That's a conversation. That a whole other podcast.
Daniel Jester:
No, it's a podcast. Somebody else can have that podcast, but this reinforces the need for a technology solution that you trust. And that is giving you accurate information and hopefully not impacting production by trying to measure it. Which is a huge issue that we have in this industry, having photographers self-report multiple times a day on how many things they shot instead of just knowing that.
David Hice:
Yeah. And that went into a lot of the planning we've done so far, right? Okay. We know we need this. We know we need this need for two different locations for two different studios and then hopefully, maybe even more in the future. So we want to put ourselves in a cloud based environment that allows us to shoot in Vancouver, shoot in New York, shoot in maybe LA in the future, Europe or Asia, depending on how much the brand expands, without having to revisit the process and the tools each time that happens. That's what we're working on now is our scalable process, knowing that the business is doing well. How do we think further ahead in not only our people in our space, but also our technology and our process. So if we do open a permanent studio in New York and we open another smaller space in LA, or maybe we need to tap into Europe or Asia, we can still be within the same tools and just adding people in-
Daniel Jester:
Centrally located style guides that get pushed out to the studio. Everybody's shooting at the same standard. It's the dream, right? This is the part of the podcast that you don't generally hear, which is where we get stuck on what to talk about next.
David Hice:
But this is where a lot of the best content comes, I feel, right? I was telling you last time I was like, "You guys should just secretly record this when we're technically done with the podcast." That's another then it's I know maybe there's some issues there, moral issues-
Daniel Jester:
Well, let's why start gossiping about other industry figures and then we can't have that be pushed out there. I'm just kidding. It's definitely not you Claire.
Claire:
Oh, thank you.
Daniel Jester:
I'm just kidding. No, we it's a recurring joke that sometimes our pre-production meetings are amazing and the podcast episode doesn't actually feel as good. And then also we end up talking about something after we've stopped recording it. But what would you guys like to hear from David about? Jason former podcast guest.
Jason:
Thank you. Have you decided on a tool? Are you looking at a specific tool and how long was that process? What did you look at?
David Hice:
Yeah. For sure.
Daniel Jester:
Let me repeat the question to get it on the recording. So Jason Hamilton of Bed Bath & Beyond asks, if you've decided on a tool or what the process to decide on a tool has looked like at Aritzia?
David Hice:
Yeah, that's a really good question. This is something that I started working on as soon as I joined, because I feel like there's a big opportunity usually at most brands. And I'm speaking to Aritzia specifically for tools across a few different phases of our creative process. When I presented this to the brand, I broke it out into pre-production and timeline, marketing management, production and post-production, and then asset management. And I feel we have a need for three tools. So for the upfront campaign, editorial receiving all of our projects requests, I like to use the collaboration software called Wrike and then with our production and post production, specifically, as it relates to the photo studio, we are now getting into Creative Force. I'm super excited about that because, because I feel that's been lacking in my process for a while.
David Hice:
I have a very good understanding of this pre-production tool. I've used Jira and Trello and obviously Wrike and a bunch of different upfront tools. And Wrike seems to be my favorite for that. And then asset management. So DAM management, I still haven't found the perfect tool. There's probably a few, I can say we probably shouldn't use, I won't get into that, but there's also a definite need for that for us as well. And then this middle piece, like I said, Creative Force is kind of solving what we've done. Just every studio's kind of a little different how they get that part of the process done. To answer your question, Wrike, Creative Force, and we're actively searching for a DAM to kind of round out our-
Daniel Jester:
All the DAM providers in the room, just... And also now you know why David is on stage with me. We have this word Slido for questions. There's some questions that have been asked here, I'm sorry for going off book and just pointing at people in the room. So here's a question for you, David. Getting aligned with project management, especially pre-production who is harder to wrangle your clients in house or out of house or creatives? So clients, in your case, being your internal stakeholders, marketing or merchandising or marketing or whoever it is, or the creatives themselves.
David Hice:
Yeah, for sure. I think because I work in the studio, I have arms length access to most of the creatives, that's easier for me. For us, since most of the business stakeholders are in Vancouver, that's definitely been more of a challenge. Onboarding remotely, working with them remotely when I joined COVID was still very much a thing so I couldn't even go to the corporate office to meet people in person. I just went for the first time a couple weeks ago. So to answer that question, it's the business stakeholders. It's wrangling all of the projects that are coming in from the side right now. Right. So within the photo studio for eCom, we generally have that process flow. There's still some work to be done there, but for all the other creative requests that are coming in from all angles. So we want to corral that and put it through this process that we just talked about with Wrike, with Creative Force, ultimately ending up in a DAM and then it being delivered to wherever it needs to go.
Daniel Jester:
Good. Great. Yeah.
David Hice:
Sounds easy. Right. Sounds-
Daniel Jester:
Yeah, totally. Yeah. An anonymous question asker here wants to know if you're hiring for the new studio. So presumably they're in the room.
David Hice:
We are always hiring. So the answer is yes.
Daniel Jester:
Corner him.
David Hice:
And then yeah... I was going to say either corner me, threaten me, or obviously go to aritzia.com and the careers page and see what we're doing.
Daniel Jester:
Oh man, the questions are rolling in.
David Hice:
We are actively hiring.
Daniel Jester:
How much time do we have?
Speaker 4:
Five minutes.
Daniel Jester:
Okay. So let me see. Oh, this is a good question, but I... This is a very good question. I will touch on it, but it's for me and not for David.
David Hice:
You can answer it too. This isn't just for me, It's for all of us.
Daniel Jester:
Okay. Somebody asked here. I think... What have your specific challenges if you've experienced any specific challenges with DAM systems, because this is a person who is working on deploying a DAM for their company and they would like to maybe learn from you a little bit.
David Hice:
Yeah. Without trying to put down any of the technology I've used in the past, I think some of the challenges have just been, well, they've been technical with some of the tools, right? Maybe I'll talk about that for a second. Just the challenges with the tools not being able to handle the amount of data we're putting in there. I think as we're looking for this next DAM, that's something that's super important. I want to make sure that one it's user friendly in a way that people are used to technology nowadays. I think some of the DAM tools I've used in the past have just seemed outdated and not been super user friendly. So it's been challenging from an adoption point of view and then just getting the right metadata in there has been very manual in the past.
David Hice:
And again, if that's not in there, how much are people going to use the DAM? Is it worth it? Is it worth the investment? Of course, storing assets is one part of it, but making sure you can get those assets back out of there and ultimately to where they need to go, whether that's to the website or to a stakeholder that's requested them, or just having someone be able to search in there for something they need to post so they don't have to send an email to a creative and stop them during the day when they need to be retouching or shooting or whatever it may be. That's a big problem. That's been some of the problems with DAMs in the past and why I can't really just pull the trigger on one at the moment. So we're actively looking into one that can work for all those reasons.
Daniel Jester:
Next question. Have you found any new production processes during the pandemic that actually helped streamline your internal workflow? Which is something we've talked a little bit on the podcast, but I understand it as like institutionalizing things that worked really well as a result of the pandemic, anything like that?
David Hice:
Yeah. I think the best thing that came out of the pandemic is that it forced people to use these tools that I've been talking about, right. It forced people to collaborate within a software, within a cloud based environment, which ultimately helped keep our conversation within the project. Whether that was in Wrike or wherever, even just having group chats on Slack or Teams or whatever. That was a huge improvement. In a lot of the places I worked at before in an office environment there's a lot of, "Let me just go sit by this person's desk or tap them on the shoulder." And then there's that one singular conversation that then work has then started to go out of which may or may not have been the right thing. I think visibility ability within tools was the best thing that came out of that.
Daniel Jester:
And I think probably one more. And then the question that I'd like to touch on. Can you speak to the challenges of transitioning from a centralized studio at your HQ to running two studios remotely? This says East and West Coast. I don't know. Are you guys running a West Coast studio?
David Hice:
Well, we do have the Vancouver. Yeah. The challenges at the beginning were definitely stemming from them having... We had such a solid team at Vancouver. And then we had this small satellite studio in New York that didn't have that team. And everybody was so comfortable with working with each other and knew exactly what to do. And then we all of a sudden have this new studio when no one could come out because we still couldn't travel for COVID. It was just the communication. I was new, the studio was new, just increasing that communication has done so much for us over the last six months. Like I said, we're in such a good place now. I feel totally comfortable leaving on a Wednesday and coming here and speaking, whereas six months ago, I couldn't leave for a minute.
David Hice:
It's just having that communication with the right people, having the right people on set. That was the biggest problem was, was the communication initially, because we all know what needs to get done. What has to get done. We all know we need a camera on set. We need this light on set. So that can be set up, but just not knowing the ins and outs of the brand and not knowing the nuances of their process was a big problem for us at first. And that's why we want to standardize our process, why we want to get into these cloud based tools so when we open the next studio, that's not an issue.
Daniel Jester:
Excellent. And the last question that I want to touch on is Claire mentioned diversity this morning. Photography is historically very not diverse, mainly white and mostly male has your podcast touched on the subject? And I am proud to answer, yes we have. We've touched on diversity on two different episodes. I was trying to look up to see which episodes they were. Embracing A Broad Definition of Inclusive with Jessica Lopez, episode 52. And I lost it, Taking DEI Deeper Than Content with Karen Williams episode 47. That being said, I am happy to have this conversation as often as possible on this podcast. So whoever submitted that question, if you're interested in having this conversation on the podcast or have a recommendation on who could have a conversation around diversity in our industry, I'd love to talk to you about it.
Daniel Jester:
And the last thing that I'll mention is for anybody who has old equipment that they want to get rid of, that doesn't want to auction it through Christie's get in touch with me because we have a great university in my hometown that has an excellent photography program. And I'm sure that we could probably funnel some old stuff to them. They're doing amazing work over there. He teaches not only photography as an art form, but prepares them for life in commercial photography. They do a DAM class. I went and did a presentation on Creative Force because he wants to prepare them to enter the job market, not just photography as an art form. And with that being said, that's it for this episode of the creative, creative what? That's not the name of my podcast, that's it for this episode of the eCommerce Content Creation Podcast. David, thank you so much for being a guest on the show again and thanks to the audience for listening to me talk live. And now you know that the podcast is not very good until our editor gets it.
Daniel Jester:
That's it for this episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed recording it. A quick note about this event, if you are on the fence about attending this event or any other event for that matter, I really think you should consider attending the next one. I'm not 100% sure on the next photo studio specific event from Henry Stewart, but they have already announced speakers for the broader creative operations event in LA in October of this year.
Daniel Jester:
I think it stands to reason that with enough interest they would consider adding a photo studio operations track again. These events go a long way in building our industry up, facilitating community and problem solving, and helping us feel connected above and beyond our own organizations. It really is worth attending. Aside from the Henry Stewart events, Pixels has closed the book on their New York flow event, which was also very wonderful, full of insightful speakers and engaged attendees. Pixels has announced their next event will be this September in Barcelona. Needless to say, I'm definitely hoping to attend that one as well. Whatever you decide, I truly hope to see you at any of these upcoming events to help support our industry. Many thanks to our guest David Hice, our hosts Henry Stewart events. And thanks to you for listening. The show is produced by Creative Force, edited by Calvin Lanz, special thanks to Sean O'Meara. I'm your host Daniel Jester until next time my friends.