Today we’d like to introduce you to Jiffy Page.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Jiffy. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I’ve always loved family stories, especially when I could see all the characters, my grandmother, great-aunts, and uncles were talking about during summer cocktail hour, thanks to my grandmother’s photo album. Their family was a close-knit one, who spent summers in a small town in western MA. The stories I loved best were those about the family characters who didn’t do the right thing, didn’t follow the rules, but somehow, someway did just fine.
My career was in magazine print sales, helping publishers of specialty publications. Magazines were the perfect place for me, with my love of telling stories with both words and images.
After staying home to raise our children, I sought a way to combine my love of telling stories with words and pictures with a job that mattered. It was Hurricane Katrina, actually, that crystallized the idea of Pixorium – what did people want after the hurricane? To know their people, their pets and their pictures were safe.
I knew there was a way to save and share those dear family photos – scan them to create a digital image; we’d been doing it for ourselves. It was 2006 and but scanning family photos locally wasn’t being done. You could send them off to Arizona or California, but I wasn’t willing to do that with my only copy of a precious old family photo – the ones that really needed to be digitized! I figured I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. So Pixorium was born – a local scanning source for families in Atlanta. Slides, negatives, prints… even glass slides and tintypes… we scan them all.
But it wasn’t just the photos that needed to be saved and shared. Remember those family stories? Well, it turns out that sharing them is important… not just fun and interesting. I discovered the research being done at Emory University, by Dr. Robyn Fivush in her Family Narratives Lab. She’s found conclusively that:
“Families not only tell stories of their shared past, but tell stories of the more extended family, stories parents tell about their own childhood, about their parents, and their parents before them. Intriguingly, we have found that these kinds of family stories emerge even during everyday conversations across the dinner table. More importantly, families that tell more of these kinds of family history stories have adolescent children that have higher levels of self-understanding and emotional well-being.”
https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/familynarrativeslab/family-narratives/
Now, Dr. Fivush does not include anything about photos in her studies. But, I know that in my own experience, both personal and professional, family photos ground family stories in reality. To see an ancestor’s face (wait, she looks like me!), what they wore (seriously, they dressed like that at the beach?), where and how they lived (no air conditioning???) give us a tangible connection to them and making the ancestor real and more relatable.
So Pixorium expanded beyond simply scanning – although we still do a lot of it! – to helping people save and share their photos and stories in custom books, and teaching the art of photo-storytelling. And what wonderful stories I’ve had the opportunity to create and share for my clients! From the story of a political campaign to the intimate story of life after a spouse’s death, from creating family recipe books to wedding guest books, each telling a story through words and pictures.
Now, in 2018, I’m still at it – saving and sharing family photos and stories. It’s not work – it’s what I love to do. As my high school friend, Katherine, reminded me of when I started Pixorium, “Jiffy, you’re still doing yearbook!” Ah yes, I was the yearbook editor way back when…
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Nothing worthwhile is ever easy, so yes, there have been challenges along the way. The first was deciding not to be primarily a photo scanning company and substantially grow the business. Despite the potentially larger income, I knew that grounding our work in saving and sharing family photos and stories was what I loved. What matters to me is not scanning as many photos as I can. Instead, what matters is helping families do the important work of passing along their history. So, that means having a smaller company – still profitable, but not a business based on quantity.
The decision wasn’t truly tested until we lost my husband’s income. I freaked out and took a part-time job just for the income stability. And Pixorium lost momentum. With my husband’s urging, I decided to drop the part-time job and put everything I had into Pixorium – a gamble and tight times, to be sure. But, I’m here, a year later, and my business has grown by 98%.
Please tell us about Pixorium.
As I’ve said, we help families save and share their photos and stories. There’s a process we follow which is always individually modified for the client. First, I’m a photo coach; I help people edit their often vast family tangible (prints, slides, negatives) and digital photo collections, identifying the photos that are “keepers” and giving permission to throw away (or delete) photos that aren’t ‘keepers.” Second, we scan the tangible “keepers” into digital files so they can be easily saved and shared. (I’m all about multiple backups and you being in control of your own photos.) Sometimes, that is all a client wants, so we’ll upload the photos to the cloud and or load them onto an external hard drive for each family member.
If they have stories to share, I’ll work with them to clarify the story, determine what photos support and enhance the story, and assist with the storytelling, design and book production, whether in a digital photo book of one or a few copies or printing a book of tens of copies. I’m trusted with family stories and confidences. That trust is something I treasure and never forget. What I do is bigger than just scanning photos and making books. I’m most proud of the fact I have done what I set out to do – creating a business that does something that matters, both to my clients (who often become friends) and to me. I mean, what’s better than that?
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
Taken a business course! Although I’d been in business, I really didn’t know any about starting and growing a company. I am not a natural entrepreneur. I hate to borrow money. I am terrible at analysis (yawn!). I’ve had to learn a lot “on the job.”
Contact Info:
- Address: 2221 Peachtree Rd NE
Suite X8
Atlanta, GA 30309 - Website: www.pixorium.com
- Email: jiffy.page@pixorium.com
- Instagram: @pixoriumatl
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/pixorium
Image Credit:
Jennifer Edge
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