When Thomas Anderes worked as a wedding photographer, he noticed a trend starting to build at events where he was hired. He found that more and more people had photo booths at their weddings, which appeared to be a lot of fun for guests. So he decided to build his own and start renting them out for weddings and parties. When it became challenging to organize bookings, he turned to Booqable as his booking platform to accept reservations and payments.
Fotobox-Vermietung.ch
For much of his adult life, Thomas Anderes followed his photography passion and worked as a wedding photographer. At some point, he noticed that couples at the weddings he served had also rented photo booths for their guests to enjoy. He found this fascinating and began working on his own prototype that was more compact and usable than the ones he had seen. Once he had a finished version, he rented it out to clients he worked with.
His compact photo booths allow people to take still photos, GIFs, and boomerang videos like you would see on Instagram. Clients can choose to rent just the photo booth and receive photos digitally via USB or a QR code displayed on the built-in display, He found that people also enjoyed being able to print them out, so he created packages where they can rent a printer that allows them to print up to 4 images at a time immediately.
This experiment succeeded, and he began building more photo booths and buying printers and other accessories. This was when Fotobox-Vermietung.ch was born, and he could reach people beyond his client base. The rental business now operates on a delivery model, serving customers in and around his hometown of Wettingen, Switzerland. Over the past few months, he has expanded the business to serve people in the broader region.
Organizing bookings
When Thomas started building more photo booths and buying more printers, he found organizing bookings challenging. So, he started looking for a suitable booking platform. He required that he would be able to manage stock availability, easily communicate with customers, and administer security deposits and payments. In his search, he came across Booqable and found that he could manage these things and provide customers with an online booking experience.
Now, he and his team can see the availability of each product in the backend, while customers can see it in the online store. This has made it a lot easier to organize bookings and for customers to see what days the photo booths are available to line up with their events. Thomas has also been able to set up email templates in Booqable for any situation, which allows him to easily communicate with customers to remind them of payments and more.
Finally, he has gotten a clean overview and insight into which customers have yet to pay, which have paid a deposit, and which are fully paid up. This has improved the tracking of payments and, combined with other workflow improvements, means much less administrative work. The result has been an improved customer experience as they know exactly what’s available when booking online via Fotobox-Vermietung.ch with minimal effort.
The biggest photo box provider
Thomas has big ambitions for Fotobox-Vermietung.ch and plans to become his region’s most prominent photo booth provider within the next five years. In addition, he would like to expand his shipping business to the whole of Switzerland. With the improvements he has seen from using Booqable, this has become a more achievable reality. Of course, this will come with time as he increases bookings through his online which customers are very happy to use.
