The Visual Economy

The Visual Economy helps fashion, beauty and lifestyle brands grow their revenue by using video commercial campaigns to generate leads and sales.

The business trialed, tested and reiterated their business model in the Dockland Art Spaces project and have since gone from strength to strength as a viable business. Business founder Daryl discussed their journey with Renew Australia 5 years after their participation in the Dockland Art Collective.

Initial Space Application

I started as videographer working project to project. Initially we envisaged turning a vacant space into a nice space for video professionals and photographers to add supplementary source of income to own videographer business as well as shoot own videos there.

Business development and learnings in the Renew Program

The Visual Economy transitioned their business into an advertising model, whereby revenue is generated as result of effort with sales generated as a result of the work. This enabled them to stop being the contractor or 3rd party for an agency, but instead interact directly with their clients as professional story tellers. Having Renew space in Docklands allowed them to fine tune the conversion assets of their business and value they were providing rather than just producing videos.

The Renew space allowed The Visual Economy to test out and refine our business model to create a higher value offering to their new business customers and clients.

Without the expense of external studio overheads and the time pressures of studio bookings, they could have the production set up and ready for their customers, then focus on communicating directly with
them when they arrived.

Over time, we realised the value we provided was not so much space but how we could help a customer take action. And this was digitally. We realised we could focus on messaging and sales funnels online, then hire a studio. Therefore we didn’t need to take up a space of our own following the Renew opportunity.’

By understanding what created value as a customer, we understood more about what we need as a business and we have managed to grow the business to around $30,000 per month. We deliberately held back from bringing on new clients because we wanted to make sure we were delivering for the clients we have.

Recommendation

I can’t speak highly enough for Renew and what gained out of going through that process. The support they showed us was incredible. To anyone else thinking of joining a Renew project – whether that’s a business, a Council or a government based organisation trying to appraise what Renew Australia brings – we are the result of this opportunity and process.

We are a business that started up on a project-to-project, dicey sort of ‘what’s happening next month?’ and ‘where’s the next job coming from?’ business to a business that is now on a recurring revenue model of $30,000 per month. I can’t say that would have happened if we hadn’t gone through what we did with Renew Australia. That’s a big win – both for me and the concept of the program itself.