Studio Veil Spotlight Featuring Studio Veil

Today on Studio Veil Spotlight we are sitting down with Ryan Veil, CEO of Studio Veil; a family owned business that offers Photography, Videography, DJ, Photo Booth and Coordination services for weddings and events!

What is your company mission?
“What we do is what our mission is. We provide really great, mostly media services to events. We make events and meetings less stressful because we do multiple things but also because of our demeanor; we can handle stress and stressful situations, and make it less stressful. Our goal is to help put on amazing events with great services and no stress.”

Where did the idea for Studio Veil stem from?
“I didn’t set out one day to say I want to start a wedding and event company; it wasn’t an intentional thing. It was built through the organization of Spolk Folk where I was on a mission trip back in 2001, and afterward, I had wished I had a recording of some of the stuff that happened on the Spolk Folk tour, and nobody had a camera so there was no way to do that. I enjoyed the mission trips so much I continued to go on for several summers after that but when I came back in the summer of 2002 I decided I wanted to buy a video camera and record things and then make that available for the other participants, and that’s the very beginning of how things started progressing.
It was a side job from 2005 until the end of 2010, I always had full-time income other places, 2011 was when Allie and I decided this was going to be the full-time company and we were going to go all out, full steam ahead, which is when Studio Veil really blossomed; we were giving it our full attention, we had a vision of doing many events every weekend, and corporate events during the week.”

When and why did you make the transition from Spolk Folk, missionary related video to wedding video?
“One of my roommates was engaged and asked me to film his wedding, and it was after his wedding that he told me I was really good at this and I should consider doing this. Even though I never really had this business in mind when I was growing up, I always knew I was going to be a business owner. That one little comment is kind of what sparked the whole thing to actually come into being. Like I said before, it was just a hobby for mission trips and a couple of friends who were getting married, so the wedding and event industry kind of just fell into my lap.
There’s not really a more fun industry to be within. Whether it’s a wedding or a corporate event or a grad party or holiday party, you are engaging with people in a celebratory time, during the best days of their lives in the instances of weddings, or company parties are just celebrating whether its a holiday or a new product launch, it’s always fun. It’s an environment that I enjoy being a part of.
I also feel like I was drawn to wedding and events because these are also stressful times for the people behind the scenes. There’s always a lot of details that go into weddings and events, and I think that my personality fits really well with that because I handle large amounts of stress relatively well, I can make quick and what I think are wise decisions in urgent situations, and I tend to not escalate stressful situations.”

What are Studio Veil’s top 3 core values?
“Some of the things we value highly are relationships. Especially with some of our corporate clients; you build trust with people and it happens with our wedding clients for sure, but they trust us because of our reputations and reviews and because we are the experts in the industry. We build relationships with our clients whether it’s a wedding client or corporate client. I think a relationship is a big value; they’re not just customers. If you develop relationships, then you come alongside each other and put on wonderful weddings and events.
I think the two words value and quality come to mind. Value doesn’t mean we’re the cheapest, it means that we’re producing good value for our clients and that’s what I want them to walk away with from our weddings and events. With high quality, you get good value. I have a canvas sitting in my office that says ‘Stay Humble and Hustle Hard’ and that’s something that is important to me. I do believe that if I and my team are working hard to achieve the mission and put on good events with high quality, creating good value through relationships, and if we’re working hard and hustling, that will happen and we’ll be successful. But through that, we also need to stay humble and continue to treat our clients as people and build relationships.”

What sets Studio Veil apart from the competition?
“There are tons of wedding and event vendors in town, but I think one of the things that set us apart from most of them is that we do offer all those services in one. Things that might set us apart from the few that do offer multiple services would be the team we have here as employees; I genuinely think we have a group here that cares about our clients and wants the best for our clients. I think there is a genuine relationship being created with many of our clients. I also think from an offering standpoint, our DJ services, I always call ourselves more on the facilitator side versus the entertainer side. I think that’s a difference in the DJ world. We also have the coolest photo bus in town.” 🙂

How have changes in wedding trends changed your business?
“I don’t know that it’s affected us, but it’s just things we’ve seen where there are fewer weddings happening in churches; the ceremony and reception are happening at the same location.
Several years ago the move from film to digital photography was a huge change to the photography industry, but we were kind of coming into the industry as that change was happening so I think we benefited from getting set up for the digital age from the beginning. Because of that change, however, we noticed a lot of people weren’t doing anything with their photos after the wedding so something we started offering a handful of years ago was being an all-inclusive wedding photographer so all of our packages include engagement session and digital files, but they’re also still getting a wedding album, a wall print. We wanted clients to walk away with something they could still hold, or put on their coffee table.”

You’re in the wedding industry. Tell me about yours.
“Our wedding was awesome! Allie and I got married on July 10th, 2010. She’s obsessed with the color pink; watermelon was one of our colors. I don’t know how I came across it, but Renee’s Limousines used to have a bubblegum pink limo, so I booked that for our wedding and surprised Allie with it. We really didn’t even need a limo, but when your fiancé loves pink, and you find a pink limo, you book it.
Allie and I aren’t really into drinking, and Allie is a great graphic designer, so instead of having alcohol for toasts, we had bottles of rootbeer, and Allie created labels to put over the bottle so it looked as if we were toasting with beer, so imagine Grandma just chugging a rootbeer, but it looks like it’s beer, it was pretty funny.
We had a fabulous wedding, it was a great time.”