Old-style photo booths are mostly gone, and digital selfies are in. But entrepreneur Brian Miller’s modernized digital photo booths have earned starring roles with movie studios and brands seeking new ways to reach consumers. The photo booths that Miller makes, rents and sells through his nine-year-old Glendale startup, LA Photo Party Inc., look nothing like the enclosed, cramped booths at indoor arcades or corporate parties. And the digital photos and short GIF movies they produce put users into Hollywood-like worlds – jumping from a racing train to a speeding car, or getting doused by pig’s blood. The “Carrie” example is just one that demonstrates how movie studios, apparel makers, footwear designers and electronic game developers are using Miller’s photo booths. The businesses rent or buy the booths for promotional parties, tradeshows like Comic-Con or the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or awards’ shows like the Grammy Awards and the Academy Awards. Miller calls it photo marketing. His biggest customers are movie studios because in addition to the experience at events, studios and brands gain more exposure when users share their photos or GIF movies on social media, he added. “A lot of studios are finding photo marketing – what we do – to be a low-cost method of interacting with consumers,” Miller said. “We’ve seen a trend of studios who want to create experiences that are engaging the consumer rather just with ads.” Photo marketing LA Photo Party was one of those businesses born out of a founder’s hobby that accidentally became the latest new thing. A biology teacher and freelance photographer, Miller one night connected a camera to his computer while friends were over to automatically take black and white photos every 10 seconds. His friends had so much fun goofing off in front of the camera and seeing their images immediately that they asked him to bring the setup to other parties. They wanted instant printouts – like a photo booth – and the idea for LA Photo Party was born. The company employs software developers who write the software that runs the devices and merges users’ photographs into scenes pre-created by a team of graphic artists. Scenes may come from movie trailers the studios provide, or the artists can create scenes similar to the movies – such as the “Carrie” shot. The booths rent for $350 to $650 an hour depending on the services wanted, Miller said. Booth sale prices start at around $6,000. The software is included with the rental or sale of the photo booth, or it can be bought independently. Customers include movie studios and brands, but Miller also sells to other photo booth operators. The company has an affiliation with a photo booth operator in the United Kingdom to cover that market. “We are selling systems to competitors, but there are some business reasons why we do that,” Miller said. “And that’s we’ve basically turned competitors into our partners. It has worked for us.” The company’s first big break came when a small online magazine that focused on new things in Los Angeles for young women wrote a paragraph about Miller’s business. The impact was 5,000 visits to the company website the same afternoon, Miller said. “My voicemail filled up in a half an hour, and it just exploded from there,” he said. “That was free; I didn’t pay for that. I’ve since found no publicity nearly as effective as that one graph.” Building out In November, LA Photo Party introduced its third photo booth, the Party Station Infinite. Aluminum instead of the plastic of prior models, the booth houses a high-quality professional camera, a slow-motion camera, a web camera, lights, a computer and other equipment. Computer-controlled LED lights surround the box and draw attention to it. The booth can even be set up at the bottom of swimming pools for high-end underwater shots. It sells for $7,580, Miller said, and it has caused a 15 to 20 percent jump in sales so far this year, compared to where the company was last year. The 160 photo booths he has sold so far is double where he has been at this time with prior models. “We did pre-sales before shipping them out, and that way we knew there was a big demand for that,” Miller said. “Sales exploded, and we won an (industry) award for the best photo booth design.” Miller expects to bring in more than $3 million in revenue this year, he said, and the company has been profitable every year since it started. Having no rent to pay has helped. Until recently, Miller and his 15 local employees – there’s 30 total including a New York City division and others employed around the world – have worked out of Miller and his wife’s three-bedroom, one-bath home in L.A.’s Los Feliz neighborhood. But in June, LA Photo Party paid $1.35 million for its first building, a 1,400-square-foot warehouse with a three-bedroom house behind it that is currently being converted into office space. Miller said it’s time – he and his wife are expecting their first child in December. “It’s both exciting and terrifying,” he said.
