The Unexpected Interruption — Zach Brown & Jared LaCroix of Majestic Photo Booth on Refusing to Be a Commodity

I’m Jeremy Rivera, and on this episode of the Unscripted Small Business Podcast I talked with Zach Brown and Jared LaCroix of Majestic Photo Booth. Zach founded the company. Jared joined in January 2024 on the marketing and creative side. Between them they cover the two halves of a story I don’t get to tell often enough on this show: a business that survived its own category being commoditized, and did it by deliberately refusing to compete on the axis everyone else was racing down.

It Started as a Way to Fund a Band

Zach was a musician in his early twenties looking for a way to keep touring. The idea arrived at Six Flags, where his future wife and her three friends spent an entire day taking pictures in an old photo booth.

“I said, okay, wait a minute. This is cool. I knew a bar where a bunch of girls just like you hang out. So we decided, let’s get a photo booth and put it into the bar and see if I can make enough money to go back on tour with my band at the time.”
— Zach Brown

The timing was accidental and perfect. In 2006, Photo-Me — then the largest photo booth company in the world — was replacing its film machines with digital ones and selling off the old equipment. Zach flew to Texas, bought a chemical film booth for a couple thousand dollars, learned to change the chemicals and the film, rented a truck, and drove it back to Atlanta.

“What they didn’t like about the film, we thought was cool. So it kind of worked out. They were trying to get rid of these things — and that’s exactly what I wanted, was the actual kind of like a real photo booth, not the new stuff that was coming out at the time.”
— Zach Brown

Then customers started asking to rent it for weddings and events. Nobody was doing photo booth rentals. So he pulled it out of the bar and started hauling a thousand-pound machine from Atlanta to Miami to Charlotte, recruiting musician friends to ride along and help lift it.

The Lead Source Nobody Would Think to Ask For

This is the part of the origin story every founder should steal. Because Zach had bought his booth from Photo-Me, he was on their radar — and they were fielding rental inquiries for a service they didn’t offer.

“They said, hey man, you have a photo booth in Atlanta. We keep getting these inquiries. People want to rent photo booths. We don’t do that. We put photo booths in malls and amusement parks. So, will you — if we just send you all these emails that we get — do you wanna just do these photo booth rentals?”
— Zach Brown

He went from no traction to several leads a day inside a week. That referral flow funded the website, and organic search and Google Ads picked up the momentum from there.

Find the company adjacent to you that is actively throwing away the demand you want. It’s a channel, and it costs nothing.

Why He Built His Own — and What Made It Work

Two bookings on the same day forced the second booth. Two chemical booths made the ceiling obvious: they’re mechanical, they break, they’re brutal to transport, and running them is an art form. Three or four events at a time was never happening.

Zach’s diagnostic question is the one worth writing down:

“What’s cool about this? People love these things. Everyone’s laughing in this photo booth for four hours. That was the life of the party, really. So I was like, what’s special about that? How can we extract that without the operational headache of trying to scale the chemical machine?”
— Zach Brown

He went looking for a lighter digital machine and found that nothing existed. Nobody was making one, nobody was selling one. So he built one out of two-by-fours and plywood in his parents’ basement, painted it, and figured out the digital components himself.

It was, by his own description, pretty ugly. It also produced exactly the same experience — curtains closed, people laughing, good pictures. That’s when it became a business he could scale.

Refusing the Race to the Bottom

Six or seven years in, competitors arrived, some copying his design outright. That’s what triggered the first real branding decision: “the photo booth” is not a brand you can own, and Majestic Photo Booth was born.

Meanwhile the industry ran hard in the opposite direction. Booths got smaller and smaller, the obsession became whether it fits in a car or ships on an airplane, and manufacturers flooded in with iPad-based units. Price collapsed. In Zach’s words, it became a commodity in a lot of ways.

Majestic stayed with the classic style on purpose — and accepted the operational cost of that decision:

“Our booths, you can’t put our booth in the back of a car. You can’t ship it on an airplane. We have to have some infrastructure in order to deliver our product, but I think in the end it makes for a much better customer experience.”
— Zach Brown

The hard infrastructure is the moat. Anyone can buy the iPad booth.

The Venue Placement Model: Zero Cost, 12 Square Feet

Around 2016, once the booths were stable enough to run unattended, Majestic started placing them long-term in bars, hotels and music venues. It’s the most interesting business-model decision in the episode, because they had already tried the obvious alternative — selling booths — and moved away from it.

How it works: Majestic builds a custom booth for the space, installs it, and covers all service and maintenance. The venue pays nothing to start. Nobody at the bar changes photo paper, and if there’s a technical issue, Majestic already knows and is on the way — which Zach identifies as the real selling point, because the last thing a busy operator needs is one more piece of technology to babysit.

“As long as they have 12 square feet of space, we think we can add more value to that 12 square feet than anything else they can put there.”
— Zach Brown

For Majestic, the payoff was structural: predictable revenue, plus daily real-world use that let them find and fix product bugs far faster than event-only deployment ever could.

The clever part is the event tie-in. Venue partners get credits they can use on the booth for events — weddings, corporate bookings, brand activations at their own space. Majestic rebrands the booth for that event and flips it to free mode, so the venue has an in-house rental to upsell. The event planner gets a high-quality booth at a lower price because no truck has to roll, the venue gets a new revenue line, and Majestic keeps the placement busy.

What a “Brand Activation” Actually Is

I asked them to define the term, since it gets used constantly by people spending a lot of money. Jared’s definition is the clearest I’ve heard:

“What you’re doing is that you’re trying to activate an audience and you’re trying to activate a product at the same time so that there is audience synergy around a product or a brand moment.”
— Jared LaCroix

His example: a launch for Wyn Beauty, Serena Williams’ beauty line. Serena was there, along with celebrities and influencers, and a branded photo booth guests could bring the products into — with the resulting images going out on major social accounts.

“A lot of times activations have this kind of supercharged hope of virality built into them, and a photo booth is one element because you’re creating shareable products.”
— Jared LaCroix

Every Majestic booth carries some layer of customization — at minimum the photo strip and touchscreen, at maximum a fully custom-built unit, like the one they made from the ground up for a Summer Fridays pop-up in New York. Colors, curtains, everything.

The Museum Discovery

Majestic booths are already in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Brooklyn Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art — placements that largely predate Jared and that consistently perform. The insight came backwards, from noticing the pattern rather than planning it: people want a keepsake from that kind of day out, and a museum visit is a day spent looking at other people’s art.

“This gives you a chance to kind of create your own experience, your own piece of art, essentially. Everyone loves a picture of themselves, so they’re kind of able to create their own piece of art and take that away.”
— Zach Brown

The Brooklyn Museum conversation shows where it goes next: they already have two booths and want a third that rotates with exhibits — branded for a Monet show, then rebranded for Picasso, with matching custom email messaging. That turns the booth from an amenity into an interactive marketing channel for upcoming exhibits.

And the funding argument matters in a sector where grants are getting less certain: competitors’ booths have to be purchased, typically $20,000–$40,000. Majestic’s placements cost the venue nothing. Stadiums and arenas are the next frontier — they’re in Madison Square Garden, Gas South Arena and the Moody Center, and in conversation with the Mets after an event with the Dodgers and a Rare Beauty collaboration.

The Actual Product Is a Feeling

What ties the three customer segments together — brand activations, venue placements, private events — is the same guest experience. Zach’s framing for it:

“It’s like the unexpected interruption. You didn’t necessarily come to this event or to this venue for the photo booth… We want to create this unexpected interruption that they can get in and create a memory that is tied to that experience that they’re having.”
— Zach Brown

The business goal underneath it is association: marry the feeling someone has in that booth — alone, with a partner, with friends — to the brand or venue hosting it.

Which raises the obvious objection in 2025: everyone has a camera in their pocket. Majestic’s answer is quality and constraint. Professional lighting and flash, DSLR cameras, effectively a mini photo studio. And the curtain does something a phone can’t — there’s no photographer, you’re not controlling it, you press the button and the machine takes over.

“I think the core is the printed photo strip that people just don’t get that as much anymore. They don’t have physical things to hold tangible, especially pictures. So I think they’re becoming even more special.”
— Zach Brown

That’s the same instinct I keep running into on the content side of my own work. The more everything gets synthesized, the more people want to know a human actually did the thing — that this photo is of you, in this room, on this night.

Where It Goes Next

The mission statement is pioneering the future of photo booths, with a deliberate tension in it: timeless but innovative. They aren’t trying to preserve vintage machines — they’re trying to keep photo booths relevant to the next generation and useful in new kinds of spaces. The goal is to be the top photo booth brand in the nation; they’re already in at least half the states.

Jared’s expansion of that is collaboration: bringing outside brands and artists in to design booths, treating the format as a sandbox with strong parameters and near-infinite possibility.

And the core value that comes up repeatedly is the least glamorous one — better every day. Small improvements, compounded, across the product and the customer experience.

Connect with Majestic Photo Booth

Zach Brown and Jared LaCroix run Majestic Photo Booth. If you operate a venue — bar, hotel, music venue, museum, arena — the site has an Apply Now form for the venue placement program, which is how they open the conversation and check fit for both sides.

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