Creatives in Tokyo: Mehdi Fliss on Ikigai, and Launching Photo Trips

From engineer to hobby photographer, digital nomad and now founder and CEO of popular travel-photoshoot booking platform Photo Trips, Mehdi Fliss tells us about his path to becoming a creative entrepreneur in Japan.

How did it all begin?

Mehdi Fliss (MF): I was born in Tunisia, and at 17, moved to France, where I studied Engineering. I worked there for eight years, and in the UK for three years as well. I was on a very different path to what I am doing now.

It wasn’t as creative — I was doing mechanical engineering, which was interesting, but it was more of a practical choice, a safe choice — like what I was good at, and maybe where the money was, where I could find a job easily. But you know like ikigai, I didn’t take into account what I actually like. At 30-something years old, I started to ask questions — and it started on a trip to Japan.

It was maybe 12 or 13 years ago, so it wasn’t that popular compared to now, but I was blown away. I saw a country that was completely different to Europe or home. It opened my mind.

Side note — before I went to Tokyo, I bought a camera, a Nikon D3100, but I didn’t know how to use it. I remember I tried it at night in the UK, and everything was a blur! Anyway, I took a lot of pictures in Japan, and got into photography, but just for fun.

After my holiday, I went back to the UK, and maybe it was fate or something like that, but we got a Japanese customer at work — Hitachi, so I had to come to Japan like twice a year from then on.

But it created frustration, because it was just a short trip each time, maybe a week. And it was quite intense as well — like we would go out a bit with coworkers, but we just had the weekends to travel. So I decided to talk to my boss.

It was a funny discussion, because I had just had a football injury — I had to have eight stitches. My head was swollen when I went to tell him that I wanted to take a year off. He thought I was concussed! I was successful in my career, so everybody was surprised. It’s not that I wanted to quit my job completely; it’s just that I wanted to enjoy more of my life.

I understood that if you want to know yourself, you should put yourself in an uncomfortable situation, an unknown situation, to see how you’re going to react. So I took a backpack, and went to Asia to live “the nomad life” — initially for a year.

I started blogging every day, mainly to keep my family, particularly my mom, updated on my adventures. But then after a while, people started asking me questions about traveling in Southeast Asia. Especially French people, because I was writing in French. For the first year, the blog was just for fun. But when I started to see there was interest, I started to understand that when you have an audience you can monetize it — and how to monetize it.

And I went back to Japan, of course. It was kind of a ritual to go for spring and autumn every year. I ended up spending five years of my life as a digital nomad, going from one country to another, taking pictures and writing about my trips, giving tips. I slowly built up my Instagram account along the way.

Where did the idea for Photo Trips come from?

MF: It’s very personal. Two things inspired me to create Photo Trips. The first was my experience being an “influencer” — one reason I developed my blog (and Instagram) was to live on my passion of traveling and photography.

I realized, though, that as a photographer, you don’t have a lot of options to actually live from your passion. There are a small number of people that can exhibit in galleries, etc. They can sell prints, and so on. But not a lot of people can do that.

The other reason is a funny one. I had an (ex-)girlfriend and it was a long-distance relationship. She was visiting me in Tokyo, and she loves pictures. And I’m a photographer, right — so we started to take pictures. But she wasn’t happy with them at all! So I said, you know what, let’s get a photographer for you, and then you can just enjoy the shoot – and we can meet up later.

I searched online, but I couldn’t really find a good service. I thought it would be easy to see quickly which photographer was available, their portfolio, how much they charge, how to book, and so on. But that just didn’t exist. There was a gap in the market. An opportunity to make an impact in the travel sphere.

How did you turn it into a business?

MF: I said, let’s do it. I started for fun, but you know, crazy things happen when you start.

I got 3-5 photographers onboard, and built the first version of Photo Trips — a photography service dedicated to travelers. And then quite quickly, without any real promotion, we started getting bookings, out of nowhere — that was late 2023. And we kept getting bookings — last year, we actually expanded to South Korea. We’ve had over 2,000 photo shoots in total to date — around 100 a month or so, and growing.

We’ve evolved over the past 18 months, working to help more photographers make money out of their passion. They list their services as freelancers, and we take a commission. We help develop their skills along the way. Photographers often want to show their work, but they don’t want to show themselves. So we are here to show them, we are here to promote them.

Right now we have 50 photographers registered, and another 100 on a waiting list. The goal is to become a totally global platform eventually.

What are the most important things to keep in mind when moving to Japan, to work as a creative?

MF: To be honest, the first one is — start now. Start whatever projects you want; your creative identity will come later. And second, don’t copy. You can get inspiration from others, but for Photo Trips for example, if I just copied what people did, I would be doing a completely different thing.

The competitors we have, they don’t work the same way. For example, you can hire photographers for one hour, two hours, but it’s based on time and the package you want. I was thinking as a photographer, if I get this guy or another girl, it’s going to be completely different pictures. It didn’t make sense to me. We do photo shoots that are tied to the photographer themself, and so if the photographer loves to do couples, he just does couples. We want diversity. We recently started Korean-drama themed photo shoots.

I think the last thing is to accept that yes, you’ll have to compromise what you like, for what people want — but at the same time, don’t completely forget what you like and who you are.

Art is about expressing yourself. Whether you do that by painting something or taking pictures or doing videos, you’re expressing yourself. What’s important is not the means, it’s what you’re saying, it’s the message you’re trying to give.

Interviews with other Japan creatives

Some quotes have been edited down for clarity and brevity.