Today we’d like to introduce you to Maggie and Hank Banaei.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
After moving to Dallas in 2013, I soon realized it was a time to think about my future, I needed to start thinking about my next steps. At that time, I did not know a lot about this Country or the culture, but I was always ready to learn and explore everything around me. Let’s talk about my background; I obtained my degree in Architecture which allowed me to become experienced in that field. Photography was always my biggest hobby during college. At that time, I was 25 and met Hank, we had an instant connection because I soon found out that he also loved photography as much as I did. After our second date, we started sharing the professional pictures that we took in the past years! Then we found our mutual desires and goals. After two years of dating and sharing the same hobby, I won a green card lottery and moved to the USA in 2013 and started to continue my education at University of Dallas and graduated in 2017 with Master of Business Administration (MBA). I was doing photography as a side job until Hank moved to Dallas and we started building our life and career together. He had a great remodeling and design experience from Iran, so both us shared our artistic views. Due to the great economy in this city and enormous job opportunities, we always had great opportunities there for us.
Over the years, we gained a lot of experience with careers in construction and design, while we continued doing photography on the side, it was a fun escape for us, and it filled our creative side. Our friends requested us to take their engagement pictures and we jumped on this opportunity very quickly. This opportunity allowed it to be our first official work in the USA, as photographers. We thrived to capture beautiful memories, exploring new places, people, food, and cultures. Our friends that had allowed us to do their engagement session shared their photos at their wedding and the overwhelmingly positive feedback we received was enormous. We were so thankful for the opportunity. The amount of support we received made us think about starting an actual photography business. Soon after, we decided on a name for our business and decided to work on our website page, Facebook, IG pages, The Knot, and WeddingWire profiles to advertise. We kept receiving booking after booking and thankfully we were booked up with events and weddings for over six months within the first month of creating our own business. The excitement filled us with joy and happiness! We came to the US to start a new life and ended up falling in love with everything about America, the free-thinking and anything-is-possible spirit. The US is famous for the fact of being “land of opportunity.” We go above and beyond to ensure our clients are well taken care of throughout the whole session whether it be small or big because we don’t consider photography a job it’s our dream, we love what we do and it allows us to pour love into our sessions.
We ensure that everyone as family and prioritizes our client’s happiness first because it makes us happy.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Our path was very smooth and clear because we set our goals and dream about each and every one of them. We dreamed about these days; meeting new clients, taking pictures of beautiful moments, capturing one of the couples’ happiest days, sharing faces filled with beautiful smiles and tears of joy. We believe sharing positive thoughts and beautiful stories that make you feel wonderful. Some days, we were swamped with tons of pictures to edit, weddings sessions to attend and family sessions to take care of but we are a strong team together because we have each other’s back, that will ensure us to reach new milestones. Our journey, this whole time has been about following our dream and making other people’s dreams come true by capturing their most special moments. Every journey has its ups and downs, but we are thankful even for those moments because without them we wouldn’t be here today to share our life story with you. This photography journey we took on made us stronger as a team and made it feel like anything is possible with hard work.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Maggie Portraits story. Tell us more about the business.
We think one of our strength is the ability to communicate with couples and make them feel comfortable from the first email to the wedding day. Listening and understanding different cultures and desires make us feel competitive compared to all the other Dallas photographers. The fact that we came from a different country with different culture and background leads us to be more understanding of most situations and events. We love meeting our clients and get to know them better by sharing our story with them, as well as them sharing their story with us. Photography is not an easy career path because you must put clients’ taste first, in a field where there is a ton of competition and different photography styles by honoring the client’s desires, we tend to win more clients over. As of today, we have a great record of satisfied couples from different countries, with different religions and cultures.
There has not been one wedding that has been the same and it’s our job to capture all those specials moments.
We’re most proud of the couples and families that put their trust in us to capture one of the most amazing days of their life. We are proud to record all laughs, tears of joy and candid moments, family & engagement sessions, events, and parties. We would like to say “THANK YOU” to each one of our clients for trusting us and sharing their most beautiful moments with Maggie Portraits (Maggie & Hank). Our happiest moments are when a client shares their photos on social media with excitement, framed images and or show their memory book. The happiness on our client’s faces is the best thank you we can receive.
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
Being a good listener has led us to gain a huge great variety of clients. One of the key factors for a good photographer is being flexible and making others comfortable to show their raw emotions while capturing them. We like our clients to be natural and add their own emotion in their poses after we request them to stand a certain way. Our work ethic and creativity has led us to go beyond each couple’s emotions. We ask our clients to share inspiration photos they like to capture, so we can capture exactly what they are looking for while and it allows us to know their style better. An eye-catching photo will be captured when you know more about couple’s style and taste when we meet a couple we let them talk about everything and allow them to share with us everything they possibly can.
Pricing:
- Our packages starting price is at $1000 with two professional photographers
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.maggieportraits.com/
- Phone: 2144145851
- Email: maggieportraits@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maggie_portraits/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maggieportraits/
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