Snapped! Royal Oak Photo Booth Biz is Sold

In seven years, ShutterBooth has created 6 million memories for more than 15,000 clients at weddings, parties and corporate events. On Wednesday, founders Kim and Nolan Gottschalk announced the sale of the Royal Oak office to an Ann Arbor couple so they can focus more aggressively on additional expansion. The Gottschalks have 44 licensed offices nationwide.

Sara and Mike Robins now own and operate the office located in an 1,900 square-foot building at 1225 E. 11 Mile Road that serves Metro Detroit and beyond.

ShutterBooth provides portable photo booths for all types of events, but weddings are the most popular, Mike Robins said. Guests climb into a booth, get four photos snapped, and then photo strips get printed—one for the guests and another for a scrapbook.

Guests take their photo strips home and within three days the pictures are also available online where they can be printed in a variety of formats, including on a large canvas. The event organizer gets a scrapbook they take home the day of the event. They also get a DVD of all the photographs taken in the booth.

“The booth can hold up to 17 people at once,” Robins said. “An entire bridal party can easily squeeze inside the booth and most bridal parties do!”

The booth captures the spirit of an event in a way a professional photographer can’t, Robins said. Once the curtain is drawn guests are uninhibited. The booth preserves the candid energy and enthusiasm of an event, he said.

The original concept for the business was a fluke. The Gottschalks attended a wedding and thought it would be fun to give a photo booth to the bride and groom for their reception.

“They started searching for a photo booth vendor and discovered that one didn’t exist,” Robins said. “So they built one and everyone at the wedding loved it. They thought, ‘Hey, there might be a business here!’”

Ultimately, the Gottschalks invented a portable photo booth that fits into a series of boxes compact enough to fit in a Smart Car and the ideas kept coming. Recently they added a video function to the booth and are working on a way to allow guests to post their photos to social media sites, such as Facebook, immediately.

“At a typical event we’ll take 500 to 700 photos,” Robins said. “At large wedding receptions we have taken as many as 1200 photos. It’s a really fun business to be in because we are around happy people all the time.”

The Royal Oak office serves all of southeast Michigan from Saginaw to Lansing to Toledo, Robins said.

"The booth has been designed so anyone can fit it in a car. It's important to us to be here in Royal Oak because this location is so easy to get to from just about anywhere," Robins said.

To learn more about ShutterBooth visit www.shutterbooth.com or call 888-780-8837.