Viva Life Photography Studios High pressure, Profit obsessed Melbourne, Australia

I have also submitted this report to (((link redacted))), another good (Australian-based) site. Just spreading the word...

Real quick, the figures:

My friend got a $500 voucher in a s****. at a business breakfast. The voucher was for a photo shoot at Viva Life Photography Studios. She had to pay a $50 deposit when booking the shoot.

The shoot was done at the Viva Studios in Kew, Melbourne. Immediately after, she was pressured into signing a deal for an album plus 3 extra sides for a grand total of $2,670. This takes into account the $300 voucher. And that 300 is not a typo. The other $200 was for the shoot itself, apparently.

When she got home she wasnt even aware that she had ordered 3 extra sides. After much telephone horseplay, the studio grudgingly dropped these. A final bill of $2175. She had to pay $864.60 on the day, non-refundable, with the rest in installments.

Now, the detail:

My friend feels the photos are good quality, if generic. Pasting your own face onto the images in the brochure would be cheaper. Her impression was of a studio that takes the same stock pictures of everyone, regardless of body shape or customer wish. So a short person will be shoe-horned into a leggy model pose, regardless of how this looks. To her, the process felt industrialised; a package designed for speed and repetition, not art.

Viva stores are individually owned franchises. On paper the company is based in Fremantle, Western Australia, but there is no Head Office as such. This makes it hard to complain up the food chain. A phone call to Fremantle got us little more than information on starting our own Viva franchise!

As an aside, Vivas website provides some figures on what a franchise might cost you. It seems to me excessively expensive and weighted in the franchisors favour. This may explain why, outside WA, there arent many franchises (three in Melbourne, none yet in Sydney) and why the Kew Studio at least, is so money hungry.

But Im self-employed and appreciate a clever business model:

Offer vouchers as advertising. The vouchers carry a large but abstract value. Make people pay a deposit for their photo session so they wont back out. Design a website where the only mention of cost is most people spend between $275 and $2000, creating the impression that its up to you and can be cheap. The options are endless and we will suit the product to what you want All studios have a wide range of products to meet any budget. The same website also has fifteen pages on starting your own Viva franchise!

On the premises, surround the person, dont stop talking, distract, flatter, push documents for them to sign while they are doing something else. Show them no written Terms and Conditions. Offer no cooling off period, then get a collection agency to handle the payments so your company is spared any nastiness from customers who have well and truly cooled off. Viva has clearly studied consumer law and knows how to stay just this side of it.

After the shoot comes the stonewalling. Theres no backing out, because the balls are in motion and your album is customised and the photographer is just about to slot your pictures in. Hell or high water wont stop these balls. And sure enough, twenty-seven days later, we receive an email that the photos are now ready. And pick up by this weekend would be appreciated.

Perhaps the funnest part of the experience is the staff themselves. I confess an admiration for actors who will not drop the script. These people are marketing drones from some updated chapter of the Stepford Wives. No matter what the question, what the situation, they respond with simpering happy talk. Over the phone, I found it hard to tell if was talking to the receptionist or the answering machine.

The fun consists in this. If, like me, you dont mind being rude when you have been wronged, then you can say whatever you like to these clones and they just suck it up. Im convinced I could set fire to the foyer and they would merely melt to the sound of polite babble.

But its worth remembering that the babble is just another form of stonewalling. Talking to a robot may be amusing, but not when the robot has 800 of your dollars, and wont budge on the other 1200.

And Viva is about the money. The icing came when I told them I, not my friend, would be picking up the photos, and I would tell them when. They emailed back, offering to provide a quote for a courier. After all the ill-feeling, where I would be saying to smooth things over, how about I just send them to you?, they say wed be delighted to charge you for delivery.

My advice is, unless youre a Kew millionaire, look for a studio that provides more personalised work, minus the circling saleswomen. Then again, an encounter with the Stepford Wives does have a certain eerie compulsion.