MagnoliaPair
(Britney Smith and
Holly Everett)
Age: 26 (Both)
Reside: New Orleans (Holly) and
Shreveport, Louisiana (Britney)
Best lesson leARned: “Working with
a business partner and a best friend,
it’s a lot of compromise,” Everett says.
“[Britney] brings so much to the table
that otherwise wouldn’t be there and vice
versa. It’s been a really big challenge but
it’s been rewarding to see what we’re
capable of creating as a pair.”
It was perhaps inevitable that Britney Smith and Holly Everett would get together to form
the Louisiana-based photography duo Magnolia Pair. They
grew up close friends in Baton Rouge, and though they went
to separate colleges, each found their way into wedding
photography. Smith worked for a wedding shooter after
college, where she learned how to run a business. Everett,
who minored in photography at Louisiana State University,
got her first taste of weddings helping Smith shoot one.
Everett later left graduate school for accounting after she
realized she could make a living as a photographer by
shooting weddings.
The pair built successful businesses separately, but thought
about joining forces when they realized they were both drawn
to a similar clean, lifestyle-like esthetic and were both receiving
inquiries from similar clientele, some of the inquiries even
overlapping. They also each wanted to take their businesses
BO TH © MAGNOLIA PAIR
in similar directions, working nationally and “photographing
weddings that we are drawn to esthetically,” Everett says. “Our
intention is not to book tons of weddings per year,” she adds.
“We hope that we are working with a clientele that sees our
work and wants to be inside of our pictures.”
After some very serious business conversations and a joint
trip last year to WPPI, where they came up with the name for
their business (a reference to the Louisiana state flower), they
were off and running.
As they were building their business, they partnered with
vendors on several mock shoots, which they submitted to
wedding blogs to get their name out. They also produced a
promotional piece they sent to magazines and vendors they
liked. Now Smith and Everett are thriving working together,
taking turns as lead and second shooters on their jobs,
supporting and “spurring each other on creatively,” Smith says.
—Conor Risch
