Mike Schaffer’s clients kept trying to hire him for a job he didn’t have. They knew him as a photographer. Then came the questions about advertisements, websites and logos. A perfectly sensible response would have been to pass along somebody else’s number. Schaffer began wondering whether his own number might do. There are tidier ways to start an advertising agency. This one had the advantage of customers already asking for it.
That repeated invitation became Echo-Factory, the agency he founded in 2008. His route into running it had involved commercial photography and some early assignments photographing bands for a Los Angeles area magazine. He recalled being sent to photograph established musicians while still working out how to direct them. The situation required a useful professional skill: proceeding while your confidence was still catching up.
Today, he leads the business in Pasadena, working across branding, strategy, creative production and media. The camera is an appealing opening detail. The more interesting story is what happened as he learned to make room for other people’s expertise, and to ask questions that a good-looking advertisement cannot answer on its own.
A partner before a proper office
Schaffer had enjoyed running the photography business as much as making the pictures. Expanding its scope still required a partner. He spent a couple of years persuading creative director Dea Goldsmith to leave her agency job and build a business with him. In his telling, she was the creative director he wanted, and he was persistent about it.
Their first headquarters was a garage in an Upland industrial park. The address supplies some pleasing grit to the origin story, but the partnership matters more. Schaffer could see work worth pursuing while recognizing that enthusiasm did not equip him to do every part of it. Goldsmith brought the creative leadership he had gone looking for.
The company eventually moved through Rancho Cucamonga to Pasadena in 2014. That move had a practical brief: give strategists, writers, designers, photographers and account staff somewhere to work together, with room for concentration as well as collaboration. Even agencies selling ideas need somewhere to put the desks.
The photographer who loosened the small print
Schaffer’s photography background also produced a business decision about what happened after an image left the studio. When Echo-Studios launched in Pasadena in April 2016, it offered clients unlimited usage rights to commissioned photography, video and animation. The production facility was a division of the agency, available for studio and location work.
His reasoning followed the journey of the pictures. An image might once have been licensed for a particular publication or territory. Online, a client could need it across many channels and countries. Policing each appearance would consume time that could go toward making the next piece of work. The arrangement made reuse easier for the customer and removed a recurring source of friction.
It is a revealing choice for somebody who started behind a camera. The creative asset remained valuable; the business model around it could change. Schaffer was willing to reconsider a familiar convention when it complicated the relationship he wanted to maintain. A photograph, after all, is an odd thing to sell while hoping it will not travel too far.
Some introductions come with skate decks
In the agency’s early effort to enter action sports, Schaffer and his colleagues devised a career event for young artists. Students painted skate decks. The agency invited art directors from brands including Vans, Nike and Burton to critique the work. Schaffer later described how little reputation the new business had when it began making those calls.
The art directors came. Students met people in the industry, and the agency formed relationships that helped it win its first action sports clients. It was an ambitious bit of matchmaking: create an occasion worth attending, give other people a reason to take part, and make the introduction useful before asking what it might return.
A later watersports assignment offered another small lesson in credibility. Echo-Factory won work for Netherlands-based Jobe Sports in 2016. Goldsmith said the team prepared a 20-page pitch, but suspected photographs of employees paddleboarding made a particular impression. Their prospective client could see that the agency understood something about the people buying the equipment. Sometimes the appendix needs a paddle.
Schaffer described Jobe’s need as a search for local expertise in the United States. For the agency, understanding a client meant understanding its market as well as its product. Geography was part of the brief.
Twelve people, then a much bigger coffee order
The impulse to bring people together also found an outlet outside the agency. Schaffer became an organizer of Innovate Pasadena’s Friday Coffee Meetup. He joined an existing effort: Andy Wilson had invited the original group of 12 entrepreneurs to Jones Coffee in March 2013. Keeping that distinction clear gives the community its due. There were several people doing the inviting.
By June 2016, Schaffer was writing about a membership of 3,000 and meetings that could attract as many as 200 people. Those are historical figures, a snapshot of a group growing through repeated, ordinary acts. Members invited friends. Organizers found speakers. The gathering moved between venues as it needed more space, eventually meeting at Cross Campus Pasadena.
The agency’s 2019 account adds a less solemn detail. Weekly meetup emails became a creative project of their own, carrying memes, haikus, odd facts and comic digressions to announce the next speaker. A reminder email is usually a small tax on being alive. Here was an attempt to make opening one part of the pleasure.
The volunteer-run gathering also gave Schaffer and his colleagues access to unfamiliar businesses and ideas. Speakers came from companies and institutions including OpenX and Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Community work offered an education alongside the introductions. His professional biographies also describe mentoring with the USC incubator and advising Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator companies, extending that interest in young businesses beyond Friday mornings.
What happens after the clever invitation?
Schaffer has been unusually candid about a limit in the agency’s early work. It could make something entertaining for a business audience without fully understanding the transaction that followed. He recalled invitations designed to amuse airline executives and packages containing burner phones for utility executives. The creative idea could attract attention. Understanding what the customer needed to buy was a separate assignment.
The question he used to illustrate that gap was wonderfully unglamorous: how does somebody sell an electrical disconnect for a Boeing 737-800? A marketer can write an elegant line about almost anything. Knowing who specifies a component, who approves it and how it reaches an aircraft requires another kind of effort.
The agency began accompanying sales teams, visiting facilities and attending internal meetings. That learning became a formal research and strategy process called the Brand Catalyst Program. Its relationship with aerospace distributor Proponent stretched back to the days when the companies were known as Kapco Aerospace and Michael Schaffer Photography. The account shows how far a photographer’s client relationship can develop when both sides keep sharing information.
A yes with some machinery behind it
Schaffer’s writing about “trigger systems” tackles another everyday gap: something happens in a business, but the marketing response has to be invented afterward. His proposed answer is to prepare a coordinated set of actions for recurring events. A product release, for example, can initiate photography, supporting materials, outreach and website changes. The event supplies the timing.
One business event. A response prepared in advance.
Illustration of Schaffer’s trigger-system approach.
The idea suits his larger interest in making an agency useful to the business around it. A good campaign still needs design, writing and judgment. Preparing the sequence reduces the chance that those skills arrive too late. It also gives a client something clearer to expect than a promise that everyone will be very creative when the moment comes.
There is a similar practicality in his leadership advice. By the agency’s fifteenth anniversary, its published lessons emphasized adapting, choosing compatible clients, supporting the team and taking service seriously. Customer relationships require the everyday work of being available, understanding the problem and following through. None of that becomes easier merely because the pitch was charming.
“Talking. With. People.”
Schaffer’s three-word description of his workday, 2022
The city becomes the assignment
Pasadena eventually became a client as well as a base. At a March 2025 city committee discussion of a technology marketing campaign, Schaffer explained a placement focus on LAX, surrounding airports and ride shares. The audience was outside the familiar local circle. The task was to introduce the city’s technology businesses to people who might otherwise pass them by.
Echo-Factory helped develop the creative assets for Pasadena’s “Deep Tech: Create Futures, Not Fads” campaign. In August 2026, the city’s Economic Development Division was announced as a Gold Award recipient in the International Economic Development Council’s paid advertising campaign category. The work highlighted local innovation, including Mars robotics and quantum computing. For an agency already involved in the city’s entrepreneurial community, it was a fitting subject.
Looking ahead, Schaffer has expressed an interest in more transparent business communication: companies explaining their values, goals and intended impact clearly. It is a fitting aspiration for somebody whose work depends on helping other people understand a business.
There is a recognizable continuity between the young photographer receiving requests, the founder recruiting a creative partner and the meetup organizer helping fill another room. Schaffer keeps returning to situations in which people need to understand what somebody else can do. His business has grown around making those introductions useful. The yes begins the conversation. The work that follows gives it a reason to continue.