photography
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M+M Management knows what happens after the photograph
A photographic agency grew into a publicity business spanning fashion, jewellery and afternoon tea. M+M Management’s history shows how much of a campaign happens outside the frame.
Rooster Creatives follows the brand all the way to the table
A website can get someone through the door. This California design agency also thinks about the menu, the room, and what holds the soup.
Unauthorized Media puts a storyteller behind the page
Book interiors, pitch decks, and a view through HAL 9000’s eye: this Los Angeles design studio treats visual communication as a question of what the audience sees next.
Communication Arts sells a second look
A magazine born to keep a printing operation busy became a place where creative work gets noticed. Its enduring product is the judgment between making something and deciding it deserves an audience.
The design agency where beginners belong
At UC Berkeley, Innovative Design pairs campus creative work with a place to learn. Its most useful lesson may be how to make room for people who are still figuring out what they can do.
Rising Tides Creative thinks your restaurant has a story worth filming
A San Diego filmmaker found his next act in hospitality. Rising Tides Creative connects production craft with the everyday work of keeping a business in the conversation.
Uncivilized puts its creative brief on a $50 hoodie
The California design company brings branding, websites, photography and sound under one roof. Its own merchandise makes the personality tangible: pay the muse, laugh at the birds, and make the shirt after someone orders it.
ArtGallery and the art of buying without a raised eyebrow
A price tag, three photographs and a way to change your mind. Inside the online gallery that turns buying original art into a more ordinary transaction - and charges artists 35% to make it happen.
Pi Design Makes the Business Card and the Bigger Picture
From dancewear to aviation, this California studio follows a brand across catalogs, websites, photography and video. Its most revealing design lesson starts with two housecleaning business cards.
Ethos Brands bets on 24 partnerships and a very memorable van
The Texas home-service marketing firm puts a ceiling on client relationships while taking on everything from truck graphics to recruitment campaigns. Its SALT rebrand shows how those jobs can collide.
BLACK + GOLD knows a photograph needs somewhere to go
Elizabeth Waterman’s creative studio connects the shoot to the social feed, the book launch and the gallery wall. Its most revealing work starts with people, then gives their pictures a job.
Foto Shop’s real business: the errands a camera can’t finish
A Danville photo shop put family memories, passport pictures and fingerprinting on the same service list. Its unlikely mix offers a useful lesson in what people will still pay someone else to handle.
DigitalFusion knows what happens after the shutter clicks
A Venice Beach garage became a photo lab, a software business and a print shop. The thread connecting them: keeping an image intact through every hand it passes through.
Coast Creative sells the work behind the scroll
A sandwich sweepstakes, a cane collection, and a former NFL running back: inside the San Diego agency turning everyday businesses into things people want to watch.
The Camera Company That Left Twelve Bodies on the Moon
A 185-year-old Swedish name, twelve camera bodies still sitting in the lunar dust, and a $7,399 flagship. How Hasselblad turned a tiny, expensive niche into a brand that outlives its owners.
Lexar Beat the Company That Invented the SD Card to the First 1TB SD Card
A 1996 spin-off that Micron owned and then let go, Lexar was bought for its name in 2017 - and has since shipped some of the fastest cards photographers and gamers can buy.
The Largest Camera Store in Texas Bet Its Future on the One Thing Amazon Can't Ship
It started as a repair bench in 1976. Fifty years later, Texas's largest camera store is still winning by doing the things a shipping box can't: fixing gear, developing film, and teaching people how to actually use the cameras they buy.
The Camera Store That Closes for Shabbat and Still Outsells Everyone
One store. Zero franchises. 400,000 products flying overhead on ceiling conveyor belts - and a checkout button that switches off every Friday at sundown. Here is how a Hasidic-owned camera shop became the gear counter for the entire creative internet.
Nikon Spent a Century Perfecting Light. Now It Is Betting the Company on Everything Except Cameras.
The camera brand your grandparents trusted now etches microchips, prints jet parts in metal, and photographs living cells. In 2026 that pivot is running at a loss - and Nikon says that is the point.
The 18th Street Camera Shop That Refused to Become a Website
A Holocaust survivor opened a camera counter on 34th Street in 1974. Fifty years later his shop is a rental house, a photo lab, a B2B supplier and a YouTube school - and it still keeps the lights on at one address in the Flatiron District.
The Lens Company That Refuses to Leave One Town in Japan
Sigma makes every lens it sells in one snowy Japanese town, sells them for a fraction of the big brands, and just carved a camera out of a solid block of aluminum. Here is how the underdog of optics built a loyal following from a warehouse on Long Island.
Phillips
Phillips has spent 230 years learning how to make a room want something. Its modern trick is turning that theater into a focused global marketplace for art, design, watches and jewels - without trying to sell everything else.
SmugMug
SmugMug is a paid photo and video hosting platform that helps photographers showcase, share, protect, and sell their work. Founded in 2002 by father-and-son team Chris and Don MacAskill and bootstrapped without venture capital, it built a subscription business around customizable portfolio sites, password-protected client galleries, unlimited storage, and built-in print and digital sales. In 2018 SmugMug acquired Flickr, adding tens of millions of community photographers, and in 2022 the two brands launched the nonprofit Flickr Foundation to keep historically significant photos accessible for the next 100 years.
Skillshare
Skillshare is an online learning community where creatives learn by doing. Through tens of thousands of project-based video classes taught by working professionals - in illustration, design, photography, film, marketing, music and more - the New York-based platform turns a flat monthly subscription into access to a library built and taught by practitioners rather than academics. Founded in 2010, it has grown into one of the largest creative learning marketplaces in the world.
Zenfolio Inc
Zenfolio is a SaaS platform built specifically for professional photographers, bundling portfolio websites, client galleries, proofing, print fulfillment, e-commerce, booking and studio-management tools into one system. Founded in 2005, it has served a community of hundreds of thousands of photographers worldwide and, under owner Centre Lane Partners, has rebuilt itself around an AI-driven 'NextZen' platform plus sibling brands Format, PhotoRefine.ai, PhotoBooker and Prints Marketplace.
Domestika
Domestika is a global learning platform for creatives - illustrators, designers, photographers, animators, writers - built around professionally produced video courses and an enormous community of working professionals. Founded in Spain in 2002 as a forum, it became a unicorn in 2022 and now hosts millions of students taking courses in more than 10 languages.
HoneyBook
HoneyBook is an AI-powered business management platform built for independent service professionals - photographers, event planners, consultants, and creative freelancers. Founded in 2013 in San Francisco with roots in Tel Aviv, the platform combines CRM, contracts, invoicing, payments, scheduling, and workflow automation into a single clientflow hub. With $498M in total funding, a $2.4B valuation, $140M ARR, and more than $12 billion in payments processed, HoneyBook has become the dominant platform for the growing independent economy - helping over 100,000 small business owners run client relationships from first inquiry to final payment without switching between a dozen tools.
Wirestock
Wirestock is a two-sided marketplace that connects 700,000+ photographers, videographers, illustrators, and 3D artists with AI labs that need ethically-sourced, high-quality multimodal training data. After pivoting from stock-content distribution in 2023, the company now supplies six of the largest foundation-model makers and is running at a $40M revenue run rate.