Mini Albums are small but very powerful. Selling them to clients may bring in a little revenue, but that's not the most useful thing about them. Consider the following scenarios (we've seen most of them ourselves, including the last one):

Scenario: Your client has just approved the draft for her album. A week later you give her a Mini Album of it. For years, she carries it in her pocketbook, and hundreds of people see it - and your logo.

Scenario: There's a break in the action. The bridesmaids look bored (and single!). You pull a Mini out of your pocket, hand it over, and say "This is the sort of album that Mary is getting."

Scenario: A prospective client asks about extra copies of the album for the parents, and is obviously disappointed when she learns that they won't fit in her budget. You mention that she could get two Mini Albums for around $100 each, and she smiles.

Scenario: You're out in your car, see a wedding cake store, drop in, chat a bit, and hand the owner a Mini Album.

Scenario: Tonight's DJ is a good one - makes your life easy. You show him the Mini Album in your pocket, he says "Wow!" and asks if he can keep it. Of course he can keep it.

Scenario: A bride and groom is resisting your efforts to get a certain photo. You pull a Mini Album out of your pocket and show them what you're trying to do. They say "Hey, I like that!" and you get the shot.

Scenario: A prospective client asks "Ever done a wedding at Boca Vista?", you reach into the box where you keep a Mini Album for every wedding you've done....

Scenario: You're redesigning your packages. You're looking for something inexpensive to attract clients towards your Platinum and Gold offerings. "Three pocket-size copies of your Fine Art Album - very handy, very cute."

Scenario: You've acquired quite a collection of photos taken at the Hilton. You make a quick compilation, using individual photos and a few pages from albums you've already designed, get a few Mini Albums made, and voila! You've got yourself a friend at the Hilton.

Scenario: You're sitting in a dentist chair, mouth agape. The assistant mentions she's getting married. You reach into your pocket and pull out a Mini Album. Everything stops while she and all the other staff in the office look it over. The dentist gets annoyed. (This really happened!)

These scenarios are possible because of two things - two attributes that have guided the development of our product: being small and being inexpensive. They are the iPod of albums, except they are not expensive. And we make it as simple as is humanly possible for you to get them.

A bit of history: We'd just completed the design for a flush album - Art Album in our terminology - and for reasons I don't quite remember, I had a set of 4x6 prints made from a reduced set of files. It occurred to me that these prints could be folded and bonded to form a little album. Though I made quite a mess in the process, I managed to make one. I had it in my pocket at our next wedding, and was surprised to see that a member of the bridal party was a bridesmaid in this album. I handed it over and left the room, leaving Nancy to photograph the preparations. When we met up again later, she said "You'd better get that album back - they went crazy in there, shrieking and gushing over it. Everything stopped." There seems to be some unexpected psychology involved - people gather around, heads real close to one another - some sort of party atmosphere develops instantly.

We left the reception without the album - my advice: never order just one.