Today we’d like to introduce you to Esther Landers.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Thanks for covering our story! It’s an honor to be able to share how we got where we are today. I suppose I should start by saying that my husband, James, and I are co-owners for a photography/videography business named Next Door Digital. We basically live the dream getting to capture special memories for couples and families together and do all of the admin and editing work at home with our two little boys. Of course, the dream is rife with anxiety, but we won’t get too much into that! No seriously, though, we could not be more grateful for where God has brought us and this beautiful season we’re walking in right now.
I guess you could say our story starts back in our childhood, where we each grew a love for storytelling in vastly different – and yet very similar – ways. I was always into the different ways you can tell a story through writing, poetry, photography, music, even dance, drama, and other things like that. James, on the other hand, latched onto videography from 9 years old. For him, it’s always been video and learning new ways to tell stories through the same medium. It’s really quite interesting the contrast there in how different people can enjoy storytelling in so many different ways.
Fast forward to college, when I discovered videography while pursuing a Digital Media Arts degree at the same college where he was studying. We met there at SAGU, and that’s where Next Door Digital was born. We actually came up with the name, logo, and business plan as a part of our Entrepreneurship and Venture Management class, and we loved it so much that 10 days after we got married on June 4, 2021, we registered our business as a Tennessee Media Company.
Like all businesses, especially in the creative field, it has been an uphill climb, and we dropped into the negative financially, kept side jobs, and cried many nights, but I’m proud to say that we’ve prevailed as a team, and we now support our family entirely off of our business.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Of course, it hasn’t always been an easy road. Like I mentioned before, we’ve definitely had an uphill climb. Starting a business at any time of life is not an easy thing to do, but I feel like we went on hard mode starting up when we did. We had graduated college in Texas at the end of April 2021, I did an internship in May, and in June, we moved to Tennessee where my family is, got married, and started a business all within two weeks. I’m not going to lie and say that we were even close to supporting ourselves or even fully aware of what awaited. We lived in a bedroom in my mom’s house for 8 months while we built some shaky foundations. At the end of that time, we moved into a rental home together with some hefty help from James’s family, and I started a trek at Starbucks Coffee Company, where I would come home and work on growing our business.
It was actually only a couple months into us living at this rental house that I got unexpectedly pregnant, and that has to be the hardest time of our entire life together. I suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum, which ultimately led to being unable to keep my job at Starbucks and virtually put a halt on growing Next Door Digital while I studied and got licensed in Insurance and Securities. Our dreams seemed crushed, we were financially destitute outside of rent, my health was constantly in question, and we felt cut off from everyone. I’m not going to sugar coat it because I know there are some people out there going through similar things and wondering if they should give up on their dreams. Let me tell you, if we had let that time kill our business, we would have missed out on so much. It was several years and another hard pregnancy before we went full-time on Next Door Digital, but now we’ve covered well over a hundred perfect weddings, along with other awesome projects for the City of Milan, Milan Fire Department, and others. I wouldn’t trade anything we went through because of where it has brought us today.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
We specialize in Photography and Videography. I do both services, while James mainly just crushes at videography! While we do other projects throughout the year, our primary niche is in weddings. There’s just something so special about getting to work with other couples during a crucial time in their lives and knowing that your work means something so special to people and their generations.
I would say the thing that sets us most apart from other wedding photo/video teams is that we are a husband and wife team that works personally with each client. I know many businesses in this industry end up doing a lot of associate or contractor weddings because really, that’s the only way to grow your business without finding yourself buried in work 24/7. Thanks to us both being a part of the business, we are able to do enough to support ourselves while still keeping it personal. We don’t really need to grow something huge. We just want to do what we love and give our kids everything we can.
What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
I think the most important thing we’ve learned along the way is that faith comes in many different forms. Sometimes, faith means believing that clients will come when you literally have no interest or leads at all. Sometimes, faith is believing that you can deliver consistent products when you don’t see how you could possibly get through the mound of editing you have. Faith is not inactivity for laziness’s sake, but it is an invitation to step back when you’re just striving and not actually doing anything productive. Honestly, in every step of our journey, we’ve found that faith is the answer in destitution as well as prosperity. Many people can associate faith with the low times, but they don’t understand that faith also reminds you to appreciate the success and remember where it comes from. It keeps your integrity and morals when things are going so well that temptations come.
Pricing:
- $3500 Most popular Wedding Photo + Video
- $2900 Most popular Wedding Videography Only
- $3200 Starting Price for Wedding Photo + Video
- $1800 Starting Price for Wedding Videography
Contact Info:
- Website: https://nextdoordigital.media/memphis-tn-wedding-photographer/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nextdoordigital.media/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NextDoorDigital
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@nextdoordigital.media99
