Photographer Eric Doggett stops by Gear Daddy to show Daddy Troy innovative ways to make birth announcements or birthday party invitations for your baby or child. Select distinctive themes and materials, or take a page from the film industry and turn your baby announcements into movie posters. If you're looking for unique party invites, check out Box Office Baby for other photo cards and photo prints. DadLabs ep 484 brought to you by BabyBjorn.

DADDY TROY: Welcome back to Gear Daddy. I’m your host, Daddy Troy and today I’m back with Eric Doggett and we’re gong to talk about innovative birth announcements like this one.

This episode is sponsored by Baby Bjorn. Best baby gear on the planet – Baby Bjorn.

So Eric.

ERIC: Yes.

DADDY TROY: Eric Doggett. I noticed the name Trevor Doggett, put two and two together. Tell us about this poster.

ERIC: There you go. Well, my wife and I were about to have our second son named Trevor and I was looking for a cool way to announce that he was coming so I wanted to do something a little different than what I had seen out there so I came up with this idea to do a movie poster style birth announcement and our family is big into football so we went with a football theme, shot a football out on a field and built this whole poster around it where we have his name and some movie credits down at the bottom.

DADDY TROY: So the public can benefit from your photography and photoshop skills by buying a poster like this with their own kid’s name on it, right?

ERIC: Yes, absolutely.

DADDY TROY: And where can they get one?

ERIC: It’s BoxOfficeBaby.com and what I was looking to do was to create a series of cards and posters that tell a story about the family and the child. So rather than just saying, “send us a picture, we’ll put it on a card and mail it out,” here that family can look at it and say “you know, we’re really into sports or we’re really into music or maybe we have a big thing for Vegas or whatever.” And we can pick the design that matches us and our kid or maybe what our hopes are for the kid.

DADDY TROY: So if you’re really into Vegas you can have a card like this and what would the user do? The user would go to BoxOfficeBaby.com and what would they modify on this?

ERIC: They would see this image and see the text in the areas that they can change and change the text right there and then submit the order and we handle it from there. I use the same lab that I do all my photography work through and they send the order straight to them.

DADDY TROY: I think one thing you’ll notice if you could feel these in the studio, they’re on a woven paper, really high end paper. All the photography is photography Eric has done himself so it’s really high quality photography. These are really cool. They get out of the box a bit as well. Look at this – “What happened in Vegas won’t be staying in Vegas.” Pretty funny. I love that. You guys are big Vegas people, you said.

ERIC: We’re big Vegas people and I love the humor aspect of anything I do so I was looking for a way to include that in a lot of these.

DADDY TROY: So here’s another Vegas one right here. And this is funny because you’ve got the beer bottle and the milk bottle as well.

ERIC: That’s right.

DADDY TROY: And chips as well. That’s wonderful. Tell me about some other designs that you really like.

ERIC: Well, this one we used for Trevor’s announcement for a birthday party and like we said, a lot of these designs, in fact all of them come in both birthday party versions and birth announcement versions. This is a pirate themed one where we took this shot of a pirate chest out on the water and put his name in there so it says “Ahoy mateys! Trevor’s turning 5! Bring your riches.” That’s a pretty popular one.

And these are for boys and girls so we have some girl designs as well like this one which is a little ballerina and it says “The Belle is here. Let’s have a Ball.” That’s a great one.

And then another popular one is the rock and roll series. They have these guitars here. This is more of an illustrated one. We do illustration and photo based designs and this one comes in kind of a boys and a girls color scheme for that.

DADDY TROY: Now you can also order your movie posters. What size do you have in these?

ERIC: Well, we have two sizes. This is our 16 by 24 here and we also have a super large size 24 by 36.

DADDY TROY: And high quality photo print?

ERIC: Yeah, these are actually photographic prints and what we did is we mount them on masonite which is kind of like this hard backing material.

DADDY TROY: You can hear this, listen, ready? Great. Love it. Yeah, so you could frame this or put it on the wall.

ERIC: You can frame it or put it up against a wall or anything, sure.

DADDY TROY: Super, and we have the hook up today. Eric’s at BoxOfficeBaby.com. If our users go and put in the code DadLabs – d a d l a b s, what are they going to get?

ERIC: They get 20% off their whole order whether it’s cards or posters.

DADDY TROY: Eric, thanks so much for coming in today.

ERIC: Sure.

DADDY TROY: See you next week on Gear Daddy and all week long at DadLabs.com.