Planning a Photo Booth for Your Company Holiday Party

The standard prop table with sequin hats, rhinestone sunglasses, props on sticks, boas, and a corporate Christmas sign collection

A company holiday party is usually the one night a year the whole team is in the same room, often with partners along, and without a meeting agenda to lean on. Some people are great at that, and plenty are not. A photo booth gives everyone something to do, a reason to talk to the department down the hall, and a print to take home, and it gives whoever planned the party a gallery of real people having a good time.

If you are the person planning it, here is how to make a booth work at a holiday party, from the design and the props to the timing and the approval.

Make it look like your party, not a rental

The quickest way to make a booth feel like an afterthought is a stock frame and a generic backdrop. The quickest way to make it feel planned is to put your company on it.

Your logo goes on the start screen, which is the first thing every employee touches. The print is designed around your party, with your company name, the year, and whatever the theme of the night is, and you approve it before anything is printed. Guests send their photos to themselves at the booth by text, email, or QR code, and the design travels with every copy that gets shared.

A photo booth start screen branded for Union Community Care's employee retreat

Holiday backdrops

The Glam Booth, the AI Booth, and the Keychain Booth all include your pick of our backdrop collection, and four of them were made for this time of year.

  • Merry and Bright. Colored string lights glowing over a dark background.
  • Frosted Garland. Evergreen boughs and red ornaments above a snowy white field.
  • Plaid Tidings. A red, green, and navy tartan.
  • Crimson Crossing. Deep red draped fabric that feels festive without spelling out Christmas.

If your party leans toward a black tie evening rather than a holiday theme, the sequin backdrops such as Champagne Toast and Midnight Sparkle do the same job in any month. The Classic Booth comes with White or Black.

The Merry and Bright backdrop, colored string lights over a dark background

Props for a room full of coworkers

Holiday props need a lighter touch at work than at a family party. Our Corporate Christmas collection is built for exactly that, with office humor such as All I Want Is PTO and Santa, I Need a Raise. Classy Christmas keeps it black, white, and gold, from Holiday Cheer to Pop the Champagne, and Holiday Chic brings red, green, and gold, from Merry Kiss-mas to ‘Tis the Season to Be Freezing.

Most of our booths come with a standard prop table and one sign collection chosen for your event. A second collection can be added, which is how a party that runs from the holidays into a New Year’s countdown gets both. If props do not suit your crowd, say so and the table does not appear. Every collection is on our props page.

The Corporate Christmas prop sign collection, with signs reading All I Want Is PTO and Santa, I Need a Raise

Which booth suits your team

All four of our booths work at a holiday party. The difference is what your team walks away with.

  • The Keychain Booth. Every employee’s photo is sealed into a real keychain at a second station, laid out to your design, so that the party favor ends up on their keys rather than in a drawer. It comes with two attendants and a hundred keychains, and more can be added in blocks of twenty five.
  • The AI Booth. Guests are restyled around a theme you choose, and a custom idea built for your party is part of the booking. Something like a vintage holiday card is exactly the kind of idea we build and test on real photographs before your date, and everyone keeps their real photo too.
  • The Glam Booth. For the party where everyone dressed up. Studio lighting and a flattering finish, in color, black and white, or both.
  • The Classic Booth. The 2×6 strip everyone already knows.

Each one comes with three hours, an attendant, a print for every person in the photo, a backdrop, and a print designed for your party.

The Plaid Tidings backdrop, a red, green, and navy tartan

Time the booth around your program

A booth standing open through dinner and the awards is a booth nobody used. Send us your run of show, and we will plan the hours around the parts of the night when people are actually free, which is usually the arrival hour and the stretch after dinner when the program is over and the room loosens up.

If your night has a long gap, such as a dinner program between a cocktail hour and dancing, the booth can stay in place and staffed through it rather than being packed down, which is an add-on called idle time. Three hours is the shortest booking we take, and extra hours are quoted with your event, so that you see the full number up front.

If families are invited

Plenty of holiday parties include partners and children. An open booth with no step and no bench makes that easy, since a parent holding a toddler or a grandparent can walk straight in, and our attendants are patient with little ones. If your party runs during the day, tell us, because a room full of families uses a booth differently from a late evening crowd, and we will plan the hours and the props table around who is actually coming.

Getting it approved

The person planning the party is rarely the person who signs off on it. It goes to finance, to HR, and to somebody’s boss, and it needs to survive the trip.

Our proposal opens with your goal for the party written back to you in your own words, and everything sits inside one price rather than a list of line items for a committee to pick apart. You see the actual print design before you commit to anything, so that nobody on the approval chain has to imagine what a custom print means.

An employee looking through his photo booth prints at a company event

What your venue will ask for

Venues want a certificate of insurance, and we issue one naming the venue as additionally insured whenever it is wanted. We also put the logistics your venue and AV team need in writing: a footprint of about eight feet square on level ground, battery power with no cords across the floor, and load-in of about ninety minutes with teardown of about thirty. We handle those conversations with the venue directly rather than routing them through you.

Photos you can use in January

After the party you get an online gallery of every photo, with face detection, free downloads, and no watermark, including every photo without the print design on it. That is a set your internal newsletter, your careers page, and your social accounts can actually use, with your real team in it rather than stock photography. We may use a few photos in our own portfolio, and if your company would rather we did not, say so and we will not.

Holding your date

Company parties tend to cluster on the same handful of Fridays and Saturdays, and we hold a limited number of events per date, so it is worth telling us the date as soon as you have one. For a large party, a second booth is often a better answer than adding hours, and we will tell you which if you send us the headcount and the room.

There is no travel fee for Lancaster, York, Harrisburg, Hershey, Gettysburg, or Baltimore, and Philadelphia and anywhere further out is quoted per event. See how we run corporate events, or send us the date and your headcount.