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Alaska Stock Images Celebrates Twenty Years
Twenty years, also known as an “Emerald Green” anniversary, is a remarkable achievement.  In business, 20 years is an even bigger achievement, considering that nine out of every ten business start-ups do not make it to five years. The odds of making it twenty years? Even lower. Jeff Schultz and his company Alaska Stock Images have beaten long odds of surviving, let alone achieving, success and the status of “Peerless Competitor.” 
(Photo Credit: ©2011 Mark Newman / AlaskaStock.com)

Schultz started Alaska Stock modestly, like most businesses with limited resources, with lots of hard work and a great idea.  The idea grew out of a lunch meeting with friends and fellow photographers Chris Arend and Johnny Johnson.  The business began in the basement of Jeff’s house with 16 contributing photographers and one part-time employee in 1991. 

Managing a successful business is challenging. Add to this a tectonic change like moving from film to a digital, and business gets even more complicated.  These changes strike at the very core of a stock photography business-- forcing new investments in equipment, processing, training, storage and the actual delivery of products.  In a sense it is almost like starting all over again.  These changes not only made film obsolete, they forever changed photo processing, added thousands competitors, millions of photos and significantly changed how professionals are assigned to projects. 

Schultz and his staff embraced these changes by actively recruiting talented shooters, constantly improving internal processes and market presence.  Think about the number of competitors that digital photography and the internet have added to the photography business.  A simple web search on the word “photographs” produces 111 million listings, opening a whole new level of competition.  Every company has had to wrestle with the impact of the internet.  Developing internet strategies, choosing new marketing options, obtaining a URL, web design and building a website, obtaining online merchant accounts, all integrated with shopping carts.  Alaska Stock, by now an old hand at handling change, launched its first website in 1998. 

Alaska Stock has navigated all these changes while remaining faithful to their original vision.  According to Schultz: “Alaska Stock will be the premier source for the best, most unique, and largest selection of Alaskan-theme images.  We will maintain an easily accessible and efficient library of high quality images, and we will promote these images to the worldwide market of commercial photo buyers.  We will continue to modify our product and services meeting or exceeding our clients' expectations as our clients’ needs change.”

Shultz believes that employees are company’s greatest asset. “Our team combines a number of talents all working to be the best stock agency for Alaskan material.”  This team is open, friendly, encouraging, respectful, communicative and honest with each other.  This team concept and the vision combine to form a great stock image company.

Alaska Stock has become a world-class niche photo agency that knows Alaska better than any other stock image agency, because they live here.  It has a growing collection of 500,000 images from over 200 photographers, represented worldwide by over 39 agency partners all working with Alaska Stock’s staff of eight full time employees.  Alaska Stock represents and promotes Arctic and Antarctic photographers freely exchanging their experience and knowledge in stock photography, helping their partners shoot better, more salable images.  

No business can rest on past performance.  Schultz has plans for the future which include increasing both the Royalty-Free and Rights-Managed image collection, exploring the addition of video clips to their collection, fresh pricing models, recruiting new photographers, expanding the sales team and developing www.AlaskaStock.com to make it faster and even more user friendly.  And of course, all the while, providing unsurpassed customer service. 

Let me know if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions.
Write David W. Weatherholt at david@bnewsviews.com

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