How Build an Effective Offshore Photography Team: Insights from Cherished Memories
- Alex Ela
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
A guest post by Alex Ela from Cherished Memories offering practical guidance for studios exploring offshore staffing.
At Airstudio, we’re always learning from the studios and partners who help shape this industry. Today, we’re excited to feature a guest article from Alex Ela of Cherished Memories, who offers valuable insights on building and working with an offshore team. Our connection with Cherished Memories originates from Airstudio's birth place, Stuart-Rodgers Photography, which was fortunate to be mentored by Cherished Memories throughout their own process of working with an offshore team.
How Our Offshore Philippines Team Helps Cherished Memories Photography Work Smarter and Serve Schools Better
Guest Article by Alex Ela, Cherished Memories
At Cherished Memories Photography, great photography is about more than taking pictures. It’s about reliability, efficiency, and giving every school a smooth, consistent experience. Over the years, our partnership with our team in the Philippines has become a huge part of how we operate and how we continue to scale our volume-photography business.
Why We Outsource
Outsourcing sometimes gets a bad reputation, but for us it has been an incredibly smart, strategic move. It helps us stay consistent, move faster, and keep our quality high. Here’s why we built it into our everyday workflow:
Scalability during peak seasons:
School photography runs on a seasonal calendar. Instead of over-hiring locally for short bursts, our Philippines team gives us instant, flexible support when we need it most.
Cost-effective structure:
By having specific tasks handled overseas, we can reinvest our U.S. resources into the areas that matter most—our on-site staff, school relationships, and new product development.
Time-zone advantage:
When our U.S. team ends the day, our Philippines team is just getting started. That means we wake up to progress already made—batches organized, QC done, and prep work completed.
Access to exceptional talent:
The Philippines has an amazing pool of creative and technical professionals. Their skill and dedication match exactly what we look for in our company culture.
What Our Philippines Team Does
Our offshore team plays a big role in keeping our operation running smoothly. Here are the areas where they make the biggest impact:
Image ingestion and data organization:
After every picture day, thousands of files need to be sorted, named, tagged, and checked. They handle this quickly and accurately.
Post-production support:
Retouching, cropping, background cleanup, and basic edits—all done efficiently so our U.S. team can focus on specialty work and faster turnaround times.
Administrative and workflow tasks:
Forms, spreadsheets, parent-communication prep, and other detailed tasks are handled without bogging down our local team.
Insights and reporting:
They help track take-rates, catch potential issues early, and put together summaries that help us improve our processes.
Customer Service:
They now help our US based customer service team with emails and live chat with our customers.
This setup keeps our U.S. team focused on strategy, relationships, and on-site performance instead of getting buried in post-production work.
What We’ve Gained
This partnership has created real, measurable improvements across the company:
More capacity without ballooning payroll
Faster turnaround times thanks to overnight progress
Cleaner data and fewer reshoots
More time for our U.S. team to focus on growth, relationships, and product development
Why This Works
Building an offshore workflow isn’t something you flip on overnight. It takes structure and consistency. Here’s what has made it successful for us:
Clear SOPs and workflows:
From file naming to QC checklists, everything is standardized across both teams.
Daily communication and shared dashboards:
Strong culture across both teams:
We treat our Philippines team as an extension of CM Photography. Same standards. Same expectations. Same respect.
Commitment to quality and data security:
Strict protocols ensure we protect student data and maintain consistent branding for every school.
What’s Next
As we grow, our Philippines team continues to be a major part of our long-term plan. We’re already working on:
Expanding production and customer service roles
Automating more tasks between systems
Training on advanced workflows
Bringing them into product development and customer experience projects
The goal is simple: build a unified, global team that delivers the best school-photography experience in the industry.
Want to Learn More or Build Your Own Offshore Team?
A lot of school-photography studios are starting to explore outsourcing, but they’re not sure how to begin. If you’d like to talk about:
how we structure our workflow
how we train and manage our Philippines team
which tasks make the most sense to outsource
how to build a cost-effective offshore setup
—we’re happy to share what we’ve learned.
Contact Us:
If you’re building an offshore workflow or want help figuring out where to start, feel free to reach out. We’re always happy to support fellow studios looking to scale smarter.
Airstudio’s Perspective
As Alex’s experience shows, building an offshore team isn’t just about adding capacity—it’s about having the right systems in place to support them. At Airstudio, we’ve applied many of these same principles within our own operations. Our Workflow and Task Management modules ensure that every editor, processor, or offshore team member knows exactly what needs to be done, when it needs to happen, and how each job is progressing.
With automated handoffs, clear task assignments, and transparent progress tracking, our teams—both local and offshore—can work confidently and consistently from the same structured process.
About the Author
Alex Ela is a leader at Cherished Memories, specializing in high-volume photography operations and offshore team development. He has partnered with studios across the country to streamline workflows and scale efficiently.
Explore Airstudio’s Workflow and Task modules to see how we streamline processing at scale.