At Lifetouch, we consider it a privilege to capture precious memories for millions of individuals, families and organizations. For nearly 70 years, Lifetouch has been capturing the spirit of today and preserving memories for tomorrow with quality childhood, student and family photographs.

Lifetouch provides professional portraits for preschools and schools, houses of worship and the retail market. With operations in all 50 states and Canada, Lifetouch Inc. is the largest employee-owned photography company in the world.

Our commitment to implementing new technologies helps us maintain the highest standards of excellence and efficiency, and has been instrumental in making Lifetouch a leader in photography, printing, manufacturing and processing.

Community Involvement
The Lifetouch commitment goes beyond our products and services. Lifetouch connects with families, and communities not only in the images it captures, but also in its support of many worthwhile causes.

Through Lifetouch’s Memory Missions, we helped preserve memories for thousands of families around the world. In times of disaster, Lifetouch National School Studios has replaced thousands of lost portrait memories for schoolchildren, at no cost. Lifetouch employees have visited war-torn Kosovo to help rebuild communities and provide photo IDs for refugees.

Throughout any given year, hundreds of Lifetouch employees log thousands of hours of volunteer service in communities throughout North America. Volunteers have helped build a children’s center in Jamaica and repair homes in Appalachia.

Vision
The men and women of Lifetouch share the vision to be the leading employee-owned photographic company providing innovative products and services that capture the spirit of today and preserve the memories of tomorrow.

Lifetouch Inc. became the world’s largest employee-owned photography company one portrait at a time. The Lifetouch story began in 1936, when Bruce Reinecker and Eldon Rothgeb made plans to bring their “School Photography of Distinction” to one-room schoolhouses through rural Minnesota. With $500 in start-up money, they set to work. Sharing a tiny apartment, a cramped office space, and a dream, the two hopeful and ambitious young men poured their skills and talents into their company, which they named National School Studios.

A little more than a decade after its founding, National School Studios had become the largest school photography firm in the country.

In 1978, Reinecker demonstrated his commitment to Lifetouch when he transferred 100 percent of the company’s ownership to its employees. The Lifetouch Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) has provided many Lifetouch employees with financial rewards unimaginable in most companies. The ESOP unites the Lifetouch family with a sense of purpose, providing incentive for performing the highest-quality work while providing funds for retirement.

Today, under the leadership of chairman and CEO, Paul Harmel, Lifetouch and its subsidiaries serve the photographic needs of people of all ages. Lifetouch truly is “memories for a lifetime.”

Which benefits you are eligible for depend on several factors, including your location, Lifetouch subsidiary, and whether you are hired on a full-time, part-time, or a seasonal basis.

As the world’s largest employee-owned photography company, Lifetouch offers competitive salaries and employment benefits, including participation in the Employee Stock Ownership Plan or ESOP (100 percent paid by the company), medical, dental and life insurance, short- and long-term disability coverage, discounted day care at select locations, tuition reimbursement, the Richard P. Erickson Scholarship Program for children and grandchildren of Lifetouch employees, and more. (Benefits are job- and location-specific. Please check with the hiring managers for details.) “A career isn’t a destination; it’s a journey.”

When Bruce Reinecker and Eldon Rothgeb founded National School Studios in 1936, the United States was in the midst of its long climb out of the Great Depression. The Plains states still struggled with the drought that described them as the “dust bowl,” and the country listened warily to the early rumblings of World War II. Americans tuned in to radio broadcasts of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats,” and Mutiny on the Bounty was the Oscar choice for best motion picture. With only 200 sets in existence worldwide, television had yet to reach household users, but refrigerators were slowly becoming part of the well-equipped kitchen.

Since then, things have changed a bit. The lessons we learned from the Depression and the dry years have forever changed the way we look at banking and farming, and we still struggle with the legacy of the war. Televisions — at least one, often times several — are found in nearly every home in America, and the home computer is rapidly gaining standard status as well. Breakthroughs in areas such as technology and medicine that would have seemed miraculous in 1936 have become commonplace. Even Mutiny on the Bounty has become a remake victim — several times over. During these same 70 years, National School Studios became the largest school photography company in the country. Today, as Lifetouch, it is the largest employee-owned photography company in the world.

But progress isn’t the whole story. An identity is the cumulative result of collected artifacts and layered experiences. It is both our cultural and personal history, and it goes well beyond merely having things we didn’t have before; it’s about what we’ve learned, and what we’ve become as a result.

Every experience and every germ of information we take in impacts our understanding of the world. Every loss changes the way we think about what we still have and every gain teaches us about what more is possible. Talk to any couple that has been married for even a few years, let alone 70 of them, and the theme holds true. Over years of highs and lows, accomplishments and failures, two people learn as much about themselves as they do about one another, their relationship evolving with them.

Lifetouch has evolved, too. From the schoolhouse ambitions of two photographers, the company has grown to a nationwide network of portrait artists, all of whom hold a stake in the company. Active commitment to new technology on the part of Lifetouch makes the company a leader in quality photography services, and programs such as the Memory Mission® and the Richard P. Erickson Scholarship set a standard for community service.

In spite of — or, more likely, because of — our forward progress, some impulses remain the same. As we layer on experiences and knowledge, artifacts from our personal lives, including ties to our past, are increasingly important. Whether it's fun and nostalgic, like retro fashion and "That '70s Show," or a more serious memento, we all use tools to mark our progress, catalog our improvement and predict our future path. We create things to celebrate where we are now, with the full knowledge that they will eventually become memories of where we once were.
With all the advances we’ve made in the last 70 years, you’d think something as sentimental as a photo would have gone by the wayside, but just the opposite seems true. Pictures, from spontaneous snapshots to posed portraits, are easier than ever before — and certainly more accessible than in 1936. While life changes at a pace that boggles the mind, we want an artifact, something still and solid, that we can hold and feel. What better than a photograph, an image that turns a fleeting moment into a memory forever.

Maybe we want to document our children’s growth or capture images of ourselves before the gray hair and wrinkles set in. We might commemorate a momentous occasion, such as a graduation or wedding, or something smaller, like a first bike ride. Whatever our intent, the end result is that we have created a marker, a reminder not only of where we have been, but also of how we got to where we are now — our progress.

When they started out, Reinecker and Rothgeb aimed to make photographic milestones available to parents. Over the decades they created an expectation that school portraits would be a standard part of childhood. And though digital technology has radically changed our expectations of the photographic process, our attachment to photos has not. They continue to be a measure of our present and a link to our past.