JCPenny birthday photo shoot for nearly nothing!

A previous co-worker told me about this great deal from JCPenny photo studio. I signed up a while ago but wanted to test it out myself before passing along the details.

Sign your children up here for the JCPenny Birthday Club. For children up to age 12 they send you exclusive birthday offers a month prior to their birthday. While they don’t specify online what the offers might be, I was told it is always the same offer and I received exactly what I was told to expect. “What is this awesome deal?”, you ask. Well, it has 3 parts to it:

• The sitting fee is waived. Approximately a $10 value.
• $15 to spend towards prints
• $4.99 per sheet of prints. (50% off)

We ended up getting $30 worth of prints and only spending $15. For reference, a sheet is considered either: 1-10×13, 1-8×10, 2-5×7, 4-3.5×5 or 8 wallets. We purchased all 5×7 sizes, therefore we received 12 photos total (6 different poses). You could get only 3 sheets and pay (nearly) nothing!

There are a couple of restrictions that we encountered that I think are worth sharing, fine print kind of stuff:

This does not include digital versions. You have to pay for those separately and they range from $69 to $99. I knew this going in and did not expect to walk away with any digital photos. They do have an online photo gallery where you can see all the photos, share them on social media, and order more. I was even able to download them to my phone but they are low quality and have the JCPenny watermark on them.

I scheduled our session on a Sunday since that is a day that works best for us. When they called to remind me of the appointment I was informed that there are no outfit changes on the weekend. This didn’t really bother me (I had already chosen a plain white shirt), but I can see how this might cause some people to reschedule. I’m assuming outfit changes are allowed during the week(?).

Lastly, I was told over the phone that if we are 10 minutes late our appointment will not be guaranteed and we may need to reschedule for another day. We did not have an issue with this, we were plenty early on purpose, but we did witness the next family after us arrive late and get told they would not be able to get in that day.

The process was quick and easy for us. We got to choose 2 different backgrounds from a limited set- we went with 2 plain/neutral backgrounds. We brought 2 props from home (2 stuffed animals). The photographer was good. She seemed good with kids and had some good pose suggestions, however, Sullivan kinda did his own thing and didn’t really smile big in any of them. I was just happy that he didn’t have a complete meltdown and we got some decent shots.

One thing I found kind of annoying and wasteful: when I went to pick up our prints 2 weeks later they had additional prints (and one magnet) printed and ready to go. They tried to sell me this “package deal” of random sizes I didn’t order. I of course said no thank you but it rubbed me the wrong way that they were going to just turn around and throw them out. Also, the “deal” cost $20, which is more than I paid for the ones I actually wanted. Nice try JCPenny.

Overall, we were pleased with the experience and I am happy to have professional photos of Sully. We plan to return every year for birthday photos. My previous co-worker who turned me onto this in the first place said that she does this instead of school pictures every year because it is so much cheaper. I love that idea!