Have you ever wondered how non-photographers get beautifully styled images all the time?! They’re probably using stock photos, curated images that are made for people to use for their own purposes. We’re not talking about the meme-worthy ones on Google, but more the specially curated and intentional stock photos made for creatives in mind!

How we use stock photos in our stationery business

Beautiful, branded imagery doesn’t happen overnight… or does it?! We use stock photos in our stationery business for so many things, but not limited to:

• Creating product mockups
• Creating informational or promotional graphics for social media and blog
• On our website as background or “b-roll” images
• In our shop listing images to highlight potential uses for products

WHY we use stock photos

• Consistency throughout the brand
• Saves us time + money
• Makes us look more professional + put together (impresses customers)

When you find stock photos that align with your brand vision, they become an incredible tool to use in a variety of ways. Not only do they give your brand imagery a consistent look and feel, but they also impress your audience. You save HOURS and so much money when you’re not creating content by taking pictures of each individual product.

Are you stuck on what to post? Need a specific aesthetic or color for your feed? Stock photos are great for times where you don’t feel like you have enough content, or when you need a certain color to make your feed “pop”. Stock photos are great for businesses that are just starting out as well, and want to give off a more professional vibe.

Here are some examples of how we use stock photos in our business:

We spent the time doing the design for this print and then our stock photo did the rest. It makes it look like we spent hours creating this flatlay!

These graphics are so professional-looking but only took a few minutes to whip up. Don’t waste your branding shoot with these types of filler images and get some stock photos to fill up space!

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We use them in the backgrounds of graphics to put text overlays on for social media and other graphic purposes:

And again, some more product mockups that get totally elevated when thrown into the stock photo!

You can try to keep an eye out on our platforms to see if you can spot any stock images! If you would like to know how to style these images yourself, we have resources for that too! Be sure to check out the Invitation Styling Guide if you’re interested in learning more!

Where do we get our stock images from?

You’ll notice that all of our stock photos have a very consistent style, which is because we use ONE source for all of our stock photos: Styled Stock House!

Since we use so many stock images throughout the year, it does not make much financial sense to buy each image individually. What we love about Styled Stock House is that she has a HUGE collection of stock images that you pay a yearly fee for to have access to ALL of them! She also updates the library with new collections each month – a huge plus! This makes it a million times easier to keep our stock images fresh and relevant for our audience.

Try out Styled Stock House here!

Need more tools like Styled Stock House for your business? Check out our Complete Supply + Vendor Guide, the only place we list every. single. tool. (and vendor!) we use in our business!

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The links above are affiliate links, meaning we do get a commission when you sign up. We wouldn’t be recommending the products we use every day if they weren’t incredible tools for our business!

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