Iris Booth appoints Shopify director Brandon Ghaeli as CEO

Halifax-based photography technology company Iris Booth is bringing on Shopify director Brandon Ghaeli to steer the business through its next phase of growth.

Ghaeli is taking the reins from Iris Booth founder and CEO Sue Siri, who is stepping down after a decade at the helm. Going forward, Siri will remain involved at the board level, where the photographer-turned-tech entrepreneur will continue to offer strategic guidance. Ghaeli is leaving Shopify this week and assuming leadership of Iris Booth on October 7. 

“We are thrilled to welcome a leader of Brandon’s calibre to Iris Booth.”

Ian Black, Rundle Partners

The leadership change comes shortly after Toronto-based Rundle Partners purchased a controlling stake in Iris Booth, which has built a profitable, growing business selling self-service photo booths and accompanying software to schools, companies, and healthcare institutions. Rundle and Ghaeli see room to leverage their learnings to help Iris Booth scale to another level.

“Stepping into a CEO role for a business that’s so exceptionally positioned for growth I think excites me quite a bit,” Ghaeli told BetaKit in an exclusive interview.

Ghaeli is a go-to-market (GTM) leader who has spent the last five years at Ottawa e-commerce giant Shopify, most recently as its director of global incubation sales. Previously, he was Shopify’s director of enterprise customer success for North America and head of revenue and merchant experience for Canada, among other roles. Before Shopify, Ghaeli spent over two years at Toronto food ordering and pickup app Ritual as director of inside sales.

Founded in 2015 by Siri, Iris Booth aims to make high-quality headshots more accessible and affordable for large institutions. Today, Iris Booth has hundreds of customers across North America, with 80 percent of its business from south of the border. The firm’s profits are in the single-digit millions and it has grown 80 percent annually for several years.

Led by former Shopify and Uber leader Ian Black, who serves as managing partner, Rundle seeks to buy small, profitable, high-potential, founder-owned Canadian tech and tech-enabled startups and grow them as their founders step back. 

Siri believes Ghaeli is the right successor. “The moment I read Brandon’s resume, I realized he was immensely qualified to step into the role,” Siri told BetaKit. “The moment I met him, I realized what a perfect fit he would be for the team!”

“We are thrilled to welcome a leader of Brandon’s calibre to Iris Booth,” Black told BetaKit. “Brandon has a track record of designing effective [GTM] strategies, as well as rolling up his sleeves to execute them. His experience bringing products to market, leading teams, and scaling businesses makes him an ideal fit for the next phase of growth at Iris Booth.”

Black and Ghaeli met while working together at Shopify, which was an early customer of Iris Booth. At Shopify, Ghaeli used Iris Booth’s product for the first time. “I remember even then that it was pretty obvious it was a world-class product [with] beautiful construction, quality materials, [and] the [user experience] and [user interface] was very strong,” he said.

Ghaeli said he was attracted to Iris Booth’s high customer satisfaction and retention rates, as well as its impressive operating discipline. “Sue has done a phenomenal job,” he added.

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To date, Iris Booth has grown primarily via word of mouth and events. Iris Booth’s event division, which enables it to make money while also showcasing its product to other prospective customers, has been the startup’s only form of marketing.

Ghaeli sees “no need for a major transformation” of Iris Booth. However, he does see an opportunity to leverage his background in marketing and sales to bolster Iris Booth’s efforts on both fronts by shifting from inbound to outbound and building out a proper GTM function.

He hopes to accelerate Iris Booth’s growth in existing markets like education, and newer areas such as government organizations, targeting emerging use cases like security badges and government-issued identification as well as more global expansion.

“We do one thing really, really well, and that is, take the perfect headshot every time, and there’s a large runway to continue building a win-win partnership with our core customer base,” Ghaeli said. “But even more exciting than that is this opportunity that’s emerging in front of us to step into new customer bases.”

Feature image courtesy Iris Booth.