Before she was helping small businesses stop the scroll, Kassady Gibson was examining banks. The Fairhope visual marketing entrepreneur spent her first career in corporate finance, from a Series 7 securities license at 22 to bank examination work with state and federal regulators to derivative accounting on Southern Company’s trading floor. Today she runs Focus Creative, a visual marketing agency that builds custom branding libraries of professional photography and video for small businesses across Alabama and beyond.
Her journey from finance to photography began, as many second acts do, with a camera and a family. Born in Birmingham and raised in Thomasville, where her father owns Family Medicine Pharmacy, Gibson majored in finance at Auburn. After stints at MetLife, the State of Alabama Banking Department, and work alongside the Federal Reserve and FDIC as a bank examiner, she moved to Regions Bank just as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act reshaped how public corporations handled financial reporting. Later, on the Southern Company trading floor, she assessed the fair market value of energy and natural gas swaps and option trades and reported to the CFO. “I loved it,” she said of the work. “I loved the people I worked with and always learned something new from them.”
A Camera Changes Everything
After her second daughter was born, Gibson stepped away from finance to raise her girls. She felt there was something else she was supposed to be doing, and her husband David answered the question with a camera so she could photograph the kids. Friends began asking for family photos, and a family photography business took shape. Then came a product shoot for Full Moon BBQ sauce bottles, one of David’s clients, around 2013, and the idea of commercial photography clicked. She went part-time at Southern Company and started her own business, becoming a Google-certified photographer within six months.
At the time there were only about five Google Certified photographers in Alabama. Gibson traveled to businesses to build 360-degree virtual tours, merging twelve high-dynamic-range fish-eye images into a single seamless scene. By 2015 her portfolio included some 50 businesses, much of it product photography for clients selling through Amazon, Home Depot and Bed Bath & Beyond.
When David sold Zeekee, his Birmingham web development and hosting company, the couple carved the photography and video operation out of his media department, and Focus Creative was born. In April 2020, with their daughters in kindergarten and third grade, the family moved to Fairhope, where Kassady had vacationed for years; her aunt, uncle and grandmother all lived in town, and family trips included The Grand Hotel. She licensed the Birmingham Focus Creative to another operator and launched Focus Creative Fairhope the same year.
What the Agency Actually Does
Focus Creative’s pitch addresses a gap nearly every small business recognizes: great products, weak visuals. The agency creates high-quality custom image and video libraries for websites, social media, packaging, email campaigns, commercials and billboards, handling everything end to end, including models, locations, prop styling, hair and makeup. “A lot of businesses struggle to have the right images or video for their social media or marketing efforts,” Gibson said. “We can fix that.”
The process starts with a call, generated automatically through her website’s contact form, followed by a proposal with package options ranging from headshots starting at $300 to brand sessions starting at $1,000 and full e-commerce marketing programs. She scouts locations, studies lighting, aesthetics and brand colors, and structures her packages for small and mid-size businesses, the clients she most wants to serve.
Results Clients Can Measure
The agency’s reach now extends well past Baldwin County. Clients stretch from Decatur and Huntsville to Birmingham, and one Michigan entrepreneur, whose leaf-blowing device won a best-new-small-appliance award, flew to Fairhope after finding Focus Creative on Google to shoot brand photos and videos destined for PGA Tour and Good Housekeeping trade-show presentations.
The return on that investment can be dramatic. One client who adopted Gibson’s marketing program grew revenue from $600,000 to more than a million dollars in under two years. Another saw the return on a marketing investment grow sevenfold in two months.
Gibson’s core message to small business owners is one of possibility: small businesses can compete with the Amazons of the world, but many do not realize it, and most underestimate how much video shapes perception. “You basically have one second to stop someone scrolling on their phone,” she said. In Fairhope’s growing small-business community, that one-second argument has become a full-time calling.