If you received our last newsletter or follow us on social media, you’re probably aware of our 2-1 offer. On a surface, it looks exactly the same as the kind of deal you find in a supermarket, when a company is trying to introduce some new products. You buy one. You get one free.

If that’s what you think, you’re mistaken.

There’s only one reason why I want you to get a free album. I want to you to understand what it feels like to open one, touch the cover, to go through the pages, how much stronger and more meaningful is the sensation of being transferred to those moments, compared to just scrolling through your phone images. I want you to simply fall in love with our albums. I know you will.

I could start this new Wooden Banana chapter by sending you tutorials, guides and tricks how to sell albums to your clients. Let’s be honest, if you sell albums, we make money. Instead, I want to give you a chance to get the taste of them in the most tangible way – by printing your own most important photographs. How else can you see, feel and experience what your clients do when you send them their album?

In a way, a photographer who sends the client digital files only, is like a chef who serves half cooked meals. If you never printed your work, you’ve been living on half cooked meals. Printing it will transform you from a chef who can’t cook, to a Michelin superstar, who after preparing some amazing food, sits down with the guests, and they eat together. Why? Because he loves his own food.

You’ve planned to print your own work before, right? You just never found the time. Is there a better moment to start, than when you can actually do it for free? By shouting out to the world “hey I print my own photographs, this it the only way to fully enjoy my work”, your clients might suddenly see ordering an album as something they have to do, and not some kind of an up-sell you’re trying to talk them into.

I was like many of you. I never had an album with my own family photos before. That only changed few months ago, when we started working on Wooden Banana albums. Now I have a few. The first ever fully finished Wooden Banana album is the one with the photos of my daughter when she was about 12 months. The other one that I’ve printed recently is probably my favourite. 100 pages album with iPhone images I’ve taken during the lockdown. In fact, I love it so much, that I’ve got duplicates waiting to be posted to my and my wife’s parents.

Those few albums made me realise what kind of photographer I don’t want to be. I don’t want to be a photographer, who’s grandchildren ask how is it possible that grandad’s only photo legacy is a hard drive full of images, or a folder hidden somewhere on the cloud. I don’t have a family album from when I was a toddler, but my dad was not a photographer, and he did not carry the phone with a 12mpx camera with him all the time. He’s got the excuse you don’t have. I want to be a photographer who’s grandkids will play in the attic one day, and find a box full of family albums. Can you imagine that moment? If it happens around 2050, I hope I’ll be floating on a pink flamingo in a swimming pool in Palm Spring, trying to fight the urge to have a fluorescent cocktail at 10 in the morning.

Those family albums also changed the way I see the purpose and future of this new journey we’re starting here. I don’t want us to be another album company that’s only about beautiful products. It’s so easy to get obsessed about velvet covers, types of paper, streamlined ordering process or quick delivery. Those things are important, and we’ll work our butts off to make them as perfect as possible. What I promise you instead, and what I promise to myself is this: Wooden Banana is going to focus on what really matters – reminding you everyday how important and meaningful is what you print on those pages. Real. Life. Memories.

Please! Don’t miss this opportunity and order your free family album today.

Thank you,
Mark Pacura