How Stuart-Rodgers Built Airstudio to Support Our Clients and Our Industry

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For nearly 80 years, Stuart-Rodgers Photography has served the Chicago area with the same simple promise: deliver exceptional images with care, professionalism, and a devotion to quality. Since 1945, that has shaped how we photograph families, seniors, schools, teams, corporate leaders and events — and it has shaped how we work behind the scenes, too.
 

As our studio grew, so did the complexity of managing thousands of clients, schools, and sessions each year. We relied on CRMs, spreadsheets, whiteboards, email chains — anything to keep up with the fast pace of volume photography. But we reached a point where no existing software could support the way a high-volume studio actually works.

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So we made a decision that would change our studio — and our industry.

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Born From Our Own Needs

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We didn’t set out to become software developers.  We set out to solve our own problems.  Airstudio was built inside Stuart-Rodgers, by the people who spend every day scheduling photographers, supporting schools, booking clients, managing production, and delivering final images. It took three years of development and a full year of real-world testing in our own operations — where we serve 100+ schools and more than 150,000 students annually.

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Because it was shaped by our daily workflow, every feature exists for a reason:

• Clean, unified scheduling for staff, photographers, and clients

• Seamless CRM that holds every client’s history in one place

• Real-time communication with schools, parents, and staff

• Job, equipment, and task management so nothing falls through the cracks

• A mobile app so teams stay connected wherever they are

• Production tools that help us deliver consistently, even at scale
   

Airstudio didn’t come from theory. It came from lived experience.
 

A Solution the Industry Didn’t Have — Until Now
 

Volume photography has its own rhythm, its own pressure, and its own complexity. Generic CRMs and off-the-shelf scheduling tools couldn’t give us what we needed. So we built something that did.
 

What makes Airstudio unique is simple:

• It’s designed specifically for high-volume studios

• It brings every part of the workflow — from booking to delivery — into one system

• It’s based on real operations, not assumptions

• It evolves continuously as studios grow and needs change
   

We’re proud to say there is nothing else quite like it available today.  But we stay humble in how we talk about it, because Airstudio isn’t a brag — it’s a tool we needed, built to serve the people we work with every day.
 

Our Commitment to the Industry
 

Although Airstudio began as an internal solution, it quickly became clear that other studios faced the same challenges we did.

Sharing Airstudio wasn’t part of the original plan — but helping others solve real problems? That has always been part of who we are.
 

Today, Airstudio is used by studios across the country who want to:

• Serve clients with consistency

• Communicate clearly

• Organize jobs and staff with confidence

• Deliver better, faster, and with fewer errors

• Grow sustainably, not chaotically
   

We’re honored to support them.
 

Proud, Modest, and Always Improving
 

Stuart-Rodgers Photography has always believed in doing things the right way — with care, insight, and craftsmanship.

Airstudio is simply the modern extension of that belief. It allows us to give our clients a better experience, our team better tools, and our industry a platform built with genuine understanding of its needs.

We’re proud of what we created, but we’re even more excited about what it makes possible — for us, for our partners, and for the next generation of studios.