Beyond the Sandwich: Capturing the Culture at Which Wich

Just arriving at their headquarters was an experience so unique that I don’t know if it will be topped, short of me winning a new car. I'm a Toyota fan in case any of you are interested.

It was one of the few moments in my career as a Dallas corporate photographer where I felt like an actual real-life rock star. Between the staff cheering for my assistant and I and the confetti cannons, it was unforgettable. However, even after all of that, it was time to get to work. They began sweeping up the confetti, and we started putting equipment together.

For the first leg of our Dallas editorial photography shoot, we started by putting together a PBJ party. Which Wich has a program called Project PB+J, where they give a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to organizations in need both here locally and one globally each time you buy a Project PB+J sandwich at one of their stores. It’s one of the ways that they give back, so for the magazine feature it helped tell about their corporate culture and also provided some fun visuals for this Dallas corporate portrait photographer to capture.

How often do you see a crowd of people gathered around a table with huge jars of peanut butter and jelly, and just plugging away at making sandwiches? Precisely, not too often. Jeff Sinelli is the CEO of Which Wich, and he was at the helm of this pop-up PB&J factory with his wife, and I shot a combination of both posed portraits and candids while they did their thing. There was tons of energy in the room, and I was able to capture how much fun they were having while doing good for their community.  

For the next segment, the confetti was making a comeback. I had to give readers a sense of what it was like to be welcomed to their headquarters. And yes, they welcome every first-time visitor to HQ this way. Whether you are an executive or Dallas commercial photographer, you are going to get the celebrity treatment. I had photos of just the staff doing the welcome cheers with confetti flying, but the main concept I had envisioned here was a portrait of Jeff with the black and yellow all around him.

I added a little backlighting to give some drama and pop out the confetti, and we let it fly. As you can imagine with something like this, it took several tries and reloads of the fluttering stuff to have it aimed and flying just right. There were even a few shots were Jeff was lost completely in a cloud of it, you basically could only see his legs. After shooting several options with, I was very happy and moved on to the remaining photos.

In addition to the high-energy photos, I also shot some images with more of a corporate look to round out the feature. We took portraits of Jeff in their conference room with some very cool artwork on their whiteboards, which was all done by some of the creative employees. After shooting several options there, we then made our way down the store they had at ground level to take some photos of him in a store location with some of their product.

All in all, this was one of the most energetic photo shoots that I have done in quite a while. I had an absolute blast. If you ever have the opportunity to go visit Which Wich, I totally recommend it.

They are great people making great sandwiches, and I hope you enjoy the photos!