Welcome to The Brand Bottega! Your creative partner for everything you need to market your business visually online. We are so glad you are here and beyond excited to launch our new brand.

A bit of history before we get into the details…  The Brand Bottega is a spinoff from Melissa Schollaert Photography, my business that has been photographing brands and small businesses for nearly 8 years.  My studies and career began as an Interior Architect designing retail shopping centers, hotels and convention centers.  My passion for travel led me to pick up a camera from a young age and capture images of all the beautiful places I traveled to.  Fate led me to assist a professional photographer while my design career was just beginning and I began to photograph weddings, events and portraits nationally as well as internationally.  All three of my passions finally converged and I was hooked – design, travel and photography.  Design helped me create branded environments, events helped me photograph people and spaces and I was fortunate to travel and experience the world doing both.

Eventually I started my own photography business and then also began creating imagery for small brands where all my past experience really blossomed to create a niche in brand photography.  I knew it was time to separate my brand & lifestyle work from my events & portrait business – both from a branding perspective and because I had a bigger vision of what it could become.  I saw that my clients needed more than just imagery as many were launching new brands and starting from scratch.  They needed consistency, visual strategy, a website, visuals for multiple marketing channels and more.

And so, the idea for The Brand Bottega was born.

Under our new brand, we are now offering expanded services to our brand photography clients including website design, social media content creation, brand consulting and visual strategy. These services have been developed through our experience in creating imagery for our clients, as you can’t take photos without a strategy or without relating them to the bigger picture. You need to know the function and messaging of a website to know what images will work best.  You need to have a marketing plan and create images based on your target audience.  Your social media should have a clear theme with consistent imagery and graphics that all reflect your brand.  And all of these marketing channels must also fit into the bigger picture and communicate your brand objectives across all platforms.

Our name speaks to the meaning of the Italian word bottega – a collaborative studio featuring a primary artist who is assisted by a group of other artists in order to execute a grand vision; that grand vision is crafting your compelling and cohesive online presence that tells your brand’s story. Building a brand requires a team effort, and we work with talented collaborators, each bringing with them the ability to hone in on a specific piece of visually telling your brand story.

 

The look and feel of The Brand Bottega was so important and we wanted to connect the visuals to the meaning of our name.  These inspiration images were the springboard for our visual branding, logos and color palette.  The Brand Bottega is an intersection of contrasting values, old and new, timeless and modern.  The images we chose reflected these values combining black and white, light and dark, sea and sky and mixtures of old and new.  Our goal was to create a virtual space that had the feeling of a Spanish structure overlooking the sea where you can come to be inspired and work with us to create your new brand.  Our logos feature several iconic symbols, one being overlapping circles which represent the convergence of these ideas, and the dot in the middle represents the brand’s position – perfectly in the middle.

I have been a photographer for nearly 2 decades now working with clients throughout the US as well as worldwide.  I originally studied and worked as an Interior Architect before transitioning to a full-time photography career.  My years as a designer helped to influence how I captured spaces and people, compositions and attention to light, textures and colors.  My focus has always been telling a story through my images and communicating more than what the eye sees.  My brand and lifestyle work as well as the brands I work for have a strong relation to a place and are passionate about telling their story.  I will continue to be the main photographer under The Brand Bottega, helping bring your story to life.

I would like to thank my brand clients who inspired me on this journey to create a new brand.  You are the reason we do what we do and I am so excited to serve you under this new name with our expanded services.  We are eager to create new visuals for you so please take some time to explore our new home on the web, see more of our Brand Photography portfolio and learn all about our new services Website Design + Brand Consulting.

Welcome to The Brand Bottega!