Scaling a Wildly Successful Subscription-based Business with Haute Stock Founder, Rachel Rouhana
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Rachel Rouhana founded Haute Stock, the first styled stock photography membership for women entrepreneurs. She is here to share with us how motherhood led her to create her own business and how she went from starting a luxury chocolate favor company to creating a wildly successful stock photography membership.
Haute Stock is a subscription-based business model that serves women entrepreneurs, to help them build brands, build businesses, and create financial freedom. As the first styled stock photography membership, Haute Stock paves the way to provide unique, aesthetically beautiful, cohesive collections for a wide variety of industries.
How motherhood led Rachel to take her leap into entrepreneurship [03:48]
Rachel knew that the corporate world wasn’t for her, she longed for something that allowed her to be more creative, but it wasn’t until she had her first child that she took the leap of faith.
Beginning stages of entrepreneurship [07:45]
Rachel didn’t start with Haute Stock, she actually began her entrepreneurial journey by creating a luxury chocolate company called Haute Chocolate. When she realized that the lifestyle for this business didn’t meet her goals, she leaned back into her creativity and started a Party Printable Etsy shop for themed parties. This business grew and continued when she became pregnant with her second child. At this point, Rachel was looking for scalability, so she decided to create a course to teach other moms how to set up their own party printable business. When she was working on the sales page, she recognized that there weren't any stock photos that matched her aesthetic for her party business. This, along with seeing other requests for “pretty stock photos”, allowed Rachel to see this gap in the market. She then continued on to teach herself photography and entered her next business pivot.
Why Haute Stock was created for women entrepreneurs [14:03]
In combination with Rachel’s passion for women’s rights and the fact that stock photography was a masculine-dominated industry, Haute Stock was created to support women entrepreneurs, to help them build brands, build businesses, and create financial freedom.
How Haute Stock became the first styled stock photography membership [14:40]
Even when photographers offered one-off styled stock photos for purchase, there wasn’t a way to get enough images without getting expensive. The alternative was to invest in the larger well-known memberships that offered stock images, but then you risk having the same images as everyone else or corporate-styled images that don’t match your brand. Rachel recognized this gap in the market and combined the membership model with the styled images that women entrepreneurs would want, and thus Haute Stock was created.
Using stock imagery while still standing out in your industry [17:28]
A big priority for Haute Stock is to stay on top of the trends and create fresh new collections so that your content doesn’t feel like stock photography. At Haute Stock, they use a variety of models from all ethnicities, races, and body sizes. Being inclusive and having diversity in their photos is important to them as they come up with alternate perspectives to create content that people haven’t seen before.
Challenges that go along with serving a variety of industries [22:22]
Creating quality, aesthetically beautiful, cohesive collections that work for a wide variety of industries can be a challenge for Rachel. To combat this challenge, Haute Stock maintains an open communication line with their members, always open to hearing their opinions and requests. Another way they monitor preferences for images is based on the number of downloads. This data helps them know what kind of images they need to take at any given photoshoot to add to their collections. Leaning more into the creative side, Haute Stock also pays close attention to the trends to get ideas of colors, patterns, and styles for inspiration.
What are the pros of a membership model [26:17]
Rachel shares some of the pros of having a membership business model. These include having a baseline amount of revenue coming in each month, and the ability to scale revenue while doing the same amount of work. Rachel admits that having a membership helped her structure her personal and business finances in ways that give her peace of mind. The ability to scale quickly has helped her maintain her motivation to keep up with it. Rachel also shares that the membership even offers a pro to her members because they get all the value of high-quality images without having to pay for each individual image and licensing for it.
What are the challenges [30:12]
Rachel does share with caution that while the membership model has a lot of pros, there are still things to think about before jumping into one. It is a long-term commitment, so it’s important to make sure that you are 100% committed to it. It’s also important to think if the business model matches your goals and how you want to live in the future. Rachel shares that keeping up with the content is a lot of work, but it’s what is required to hold a high retention rate. The last challenge that Rachel shares is the tech side of creating a membership. While there are some options out there, depending on what you want to do, you might have to pay for custom website development. But don’t let that discourage you if you want to start! You can start small and scale!
Growth experiences & Scaling a company [35:46]
As someone that was a solopreneur, it was a challenging process for Rachel to decide when to scale her team, but ultimately she figured out where she was bottlenecked and started hiring for those positions. Currently, Haute Stock is made up of a small team of five and a group of contributing photographers. The connection with photographers happened organically by Rachel reaching out to them personally.
How to become a contributor for Haute Stock [38:41]
If you’re a photographer that loves Haute Stock and would like to become a contributor, feel free to reach out to Rachel via email and send her a gallery! As long as you’re a good fit for the membership, from there, there are a couple of different ways that you can work together. Either by submitting a gallery where Rachel can curate from that, or collaborate with Rachel and the Haute Stock team on a specific theme.
Why imagery is so important for your brand [39:58]
When you interact with any piece of someone’s branding you have a gut reaction that is based on the imagery they are using. Our decision to be attracted to a brand or repelled by one happens within seconds, and our brain processes images faster than words, therefore before they even read any copy they have already made plenty of assumptions. In addition, it’s important to make sure that your imagery matches your copy at the same quality level so your brand seems cohesive and builds instant trust with your audience.
Before starting a subscription membership, ask yourself these 2 questions [44:18]
Rachel leaves us with this last little piece of advice. When thinking about creating a subscription-based business, be sure to ask yourself the following questions:
Is this a right fit for your audience? Is this the best way to deliver what you want to create to your audience?
Is this a right fit for your lifestyle? Are you able to continue to commit to your members long-term?
Key Quotes
“Your imagery is there to support your messaging. People’s brains are processing images much faster than words. They’re making all of these assumptions about your brand before they’ve even read a single piece of copy.”
Rachel Rouhana
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