Kassady Gibson, Focus Creative, Fairhope

One of the main focuses of Scenic98Coastal.com is to help promote and market the small business community. Kassady Gibson helps small businesses improve their face to the public. In the digital-driven world, this is an important distinction that many businesses overlook.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Kassady to learn more about her and her visual marketing agency, Focus Creative. Kassady is a busy lady, and for good reason, She’s very good at what she does, which is to provide businesses with a high-quality custom branding library of professional images and videos for all of her client’s marketing needs.

From her life in the corporate finance world to her becoming a photographer and creating a company to serve small businesses, her journey to the Gulf Coast led her to where she is today. That said, the results she achieves for her clients are amazing. The proof is in the pudding, as they say. From soup to nuts, Focus Creative creates visual content for anything from websites, social media, product boxing, email campaigns, commercials, and even billboards. 

Whether it’s a comprehensive program or a one-time photo shoot, she can provide everything needed to create a stunning library of images and video, which includes models, location, prop styling, hair, and make-up to enhance a business’ face to the public. “A lot of businesses struggle to have the right images or video for their social media or marketing efforts. We can fix that,” she says.

Born in Birmingham, her family moved to Thomasville, Alabama when she was 9 months old. Her dad, a pharmacist, owns Family Medicine Pharmacy in Thomasville. Kassady grew up playing golf, cheering, and singing solos in church on Sundays. She tells me she took nine years of piano but still can’t play well.

She entered Auburn and majored in finance. After college, she got her Series 7 securities license and worked with MetLife. “People didn’t exactly trust a 22-year-old with their money, except for my dad.” She went to work with the State of Alabama Banking Department and worked with the Federal Reserve and FDIC as a bank examiner. “I loved it,” she says. 

Her job was to find out what was really going on in smaller community banks. While living in Birmingham, she began working with Regions Bank just as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act came into being. The Act mandated certain practices in financial record keeping and reporting for public corporations. If it sounds complicated, it is, but it was an important change in how banks were regulated. 

Reflective of Kassady’s positive personality, she says, “I loved the people I worked with and always learned something new from them.” From there she went to work with Southern Company on the Trading Floor doing derivative accounting for swaps and option trades of energy and natural gas. “I would assess the fair market value and report to the CFO.” Smart gal!

After her second daughter was born, she decided to stay home to raise their daughters, now 9 and 12 years old. “I felt there was something else I was supposed to be doing,” she says. Her husband, David, bought her a camera so she could take photos of the kids. She enjoyed photography. Soon, friends started asking her to take photos of their kids and families, and it morphed into a family photography business.

She tells me that she had always wanted to be a black-and-white photographer. “Family photography is interesting. Someone is always upset.” Around this time, Instagram had just started. She took some photos for one of David’s clients, Full Moon BBQ sauce bottles, for marketing purposes. “It was around 2013, and I got the itch to go part-time with Southern Company and start my own photography business.” She became certified as a Google Photographer six months later.

“I would go inside businesses to create a virtual tour of the space. There were only five Google Certified photographers in Alabama at the time.” She would use a fish-eye lens and a High Dynamic Range exposure, and merge twelve images as one. By 2015, Kassady had built a portfolio of 50 or so businesses.

“Most of my work was product photography. Clients sold products through Amazon, Home Depot, Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and other companies. When David sold his business, Zeekee, a web development and hosting company, we carved out the photography and video business that was part of his media department.”

That’s when Focus Creative was born with the intent to help small businesses focus their image and bring their brands to life. A year after David sold his business, they decided to move to Fairhope. Kassady had always loved Fairhope because she had spent a lot of time in Fairhope with her family growing up. 

“My aunt, uncle, and grandmother all lived here, and we vacationed at The Grand Hotel. My mother is convinced there is a ghost that lives in the main building, so she won’t book a room there. She thinks it’s haunted!” 

They moved to Fairhope in April 2020 when her girls were in kindergarten and 3rd grade. She licensed the Birmingham Focus Creative to another person and launched Focus Creative Fairhope the same year. 

“My service area is anywhere a client wants me to go, or who wants to come to us. We even recently had someone come down from Michigan to Fairhope for us to create their brand photos and videos to present at trade shows for the PGA Tour and Good Housekeeping.” 

She has a client from Michigan who sells a device that blows leaves that won “best new small appliance device,” and needed videos to demonstrate how it blows leaves, so down to Fairhope they came. He found Kassady and Focus Creative on Google. She has clients throughout the state including Decatur, Huntsville, and Birmingham. She works with her clients on a regular and repeated basis. 

She spends time finding the right locations and studying lighting, aesthetics, and colors that are right for the brand. Typically, people reach out to Kassady through her website. There she has a form that automatically generates an email to schedule a call either the same day or the next day.

On the call, she talks through what their needs are and she assesses whether they are a good fit for her services. If so, she puts together a proposal with a few options. She has several set packages and customizes what the customer needs. The package may include several videos for different target audiences to a complete marketing plan for an e-commerce business.

The results have been outstanding. One client began Kassady’s marketing program and revenues grew from $600,000 to over a million dollars in less than two years. She has one client whose investment return grew seven times in two months. 

“A lot of people underestimate the impact that video content has on how people perceive their business. You basically have one second to stop someone scrolling on their phone.” She goes on to say that small businesses can compete with the Amazons of the world, but many don’t realize they can.

What does a typical session with Focus Creative cost? Headshots start at $300 and most brand sessions start at $1,000. She’s structured the sessions for small to mid-size businesses because that is who she loves to serve. 

Of course, the more involved the photo or video shoot is, the bigger the investment. Kassady strikes me as a smart business person who strives to steer her clients in the right direction and is keen to provide a good return on their investment.

Focus Creative certainly plays an important role in getting the most from a business’s image. If it sounds like Focus Creative might be able to help you grow your business’s image and your face to the public, give Kassady a call. Or better yet, reach out to her at her website to schedule a session to discuss how she can help. She’s a good person to know. 

Thank you, Kassady. Maybe you can help us too!