Apparently, small shops are even more awesome than I thought they were because they GIVE you clothes/bibdanas/toys/etc either for free or for a very discounted price in exchange for high quality pictures of your babe in/with their products!
To get these free or discounted products, you have to repost their brand rep picture and use their specific #hashtag on your sweet babes pictures to enter them into the competition. Once the contest is over, they sit and go through each entry and your IG feed to see if you would be a good fit for their company. If they choose you or your baby then they contact you via DM or post a collage of all the kiddos who won and will tag you.
After they choose you, they e mail you a contract that has their official rules and your special code for discounts. Once you get your clothes/products, you usually have a certain amount of time to get your pictures uploaded to social media.
How I take Jaxon's pictures:
- Since he can't fully sit up on his own yet, I usually have him laying down on a light colored/white blanket. You can use a patterned blanket if everything, or mostly everything, is monochrome. You don't want your pictures to be too busy or else it will distract from promoting the small shop product(s).
- I'll get him dressed in the outfit in the morning and then after he wakes up from his morning nap is when I take pictures. That's when he's the most smiley :)
- Our living room has a ton of natural light, which is the best lighting to take pictures in, so I always open the blinds a little bit but pointing up so the light isn't streaming down on his face
- I usually always take his picture from above and make goofy faces at him so he'll smile really big. This angle makes sure there's no weird shadows on his face or his clothes
- I take close to 20 pictures of each outfit because he'll have his eyes closed in 60% of the pictures I snap or he'll be rolling all over the place lol
- Once I find the picture(s) I want to post, I use the app Instasize to make them the right size to upload and I can crop out anything I don't want on the edges. The app also lets you add text to your pictures and edit it sightly. I would probably research a better editing app if that's something you're interested in. Instasize only has the option of brightness and contrast and the little things that IG already allows you to do
- Then I just upload the pic and use the small shop #hashtag and tag them in the picture
- The small shop will then repost your picture to their IG
- This allows you to get more exposure and hopefully more brands who will want you to rep for them
I remember the first brand rep search that Jaxon won, Matimati Baby Bibdanas, I screamed in excitement haha. Winning free/discounted CUTE baby clothes is so awesome because they grow out of everything so quickly that I find it hard to spend a lot of money on baby clothes!
These small shops also look for adults to rep their clothes/products so have someone take pictures of you as well!
These are the shops that Jaxon and I rep for:
- Matimati Baby- Bibdanas
- Sage and Sky Threads- Baby and adult clothes
- Gravel Road Tees- Adult clothes
- Moozega- Baby clothes
- Henry and Claire- Baby clothes
- Mocc Life- Baby moccasins
SHOP SMALL!
Shopping small means supporting real families.
These clothes, shoes, bibs, toys, etc are all individually hand made!
Most of them are moms/families that have kids to feed and bills to pay.
Instead of going to Target (don't get me wrong I loveee me some Tarjay, especially the home goods department) and spending $20 on a kids shirt, you can choose a small shop and spend the same amount or an extra $10 for quality clothes that support a real family and not a huge corporation.
I have seen many posts from small shops I follow that say things like "Sorry, please be patient, I'm at the ER with my sick child and will get to your emails whenever I can." "The kid(s) just went to sleep so you know I'm going to be up until 4 am sewing away!"
These are real life mamas/parents making ends meet while trying to raise their families at the same time. Starting up and running your own business is no joke, especially when you have 10k+ followers on IG! Kudos to all the people who are brave enough to do it and keep making our babes look even cuter!
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