Tayler Prince-Fraser is a London-based creative consultant. He’s shot for some of the biggest brands on the planet; Nike, The North Face and Dr. Martens, and is also the co-founder of the online platform, Original Shift
Original Shift started from a desire to create something that would last, maxing out character counts and turning the media world on its head. It worked, it gathered traction, and to this day Tayler still prefers to play in the long-format space over the short-and-sweet content ingrained in our current social culture.
“Every 15 seconds there would be something new, we wanted to create something that would last.”
Tayler Prince-Fraser started his photography life out in-front of the camera. Over time, he migrated from being subject to shooter and now is one of London’s top creatives. He co-founded Original Shift, the online platform, with his brother and together they have pushed the concept to be more than a digital magazine - adding a full production offering into the mix and working on campaigns for the likes of Nike, The North Face and Dr. Martens.
The concept behind Original Shift was relatively simple; to max out the character count on Instagram and tell stories through long-format copy and image carousels. Tayler, Ali, Alex and his brother Koen were tired of the mediascape as it existed and wanted to create something that would last. The page gained traction and they started interviewing people in their network and eventually started shooting their own images to compliment the stories they were telling.
From Original Shift, Tayler realized he had a passion, and a skill, for telling stories and allocating his time and resources to shining a light on underrepresented groups. With Nike Swim, he focussed on the ‘woeful underrepresentation’ of Black communities in swimming, inspired by his own film ‘Fear of the Water’.
His newly released book with Dr. Martens, Broken In, is described as an anthology of culture, stories and communities. These projects alone demonstrate that brands are willing to offer Tayler and Original Shift a platform to tell the stories that matter to them and represent subcultures.
“There’s power in saying no.”
Any creative who has set up their own agency or gone out on a freelance basis will appreciate how difficult it can be to say ‘no’ to work coming in, even if it’s way below your rates. When you’re first starting out, you live paycheck to paycheck and project to project. You try and work as back-to-back as you can, building up financial stability as you go, but even when there’s money in the bank, ‘no’ rarely enters our vocabulary. Tayler discusses the importance of recognising your value and not cheapening your own brand or resources by saying yes to briefs that come in well below your rates. Obviously, there are times and places where we want to jump into something with both feet that pays a little less, but these shouldn’t be the norm. Clients try and push rates set by creatives to sit well below their budgets, often throwing out that ‘so and so did it for X’. As Tayler rightly points out - if another creative has done it for significantly less than what you’ve quoted and the client is happy with the work, then why are they not using them again?
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