Prepping for Photo Shoot…
Immediately after our collection is finalized for the season (although it’s never REALLY finalized until bulk production…) the first thing we do is request photo samples from our vendors. We take time to go through the collections and decide what garments we want to photograph for our catalog (most of our catalog is just CAD spreads, and there are only about 6-10 model photos).
We will often request twice as many garments as we need to photograph, sometimes more, as often items come in looking really crummy, don’t arrive in time, or they get dropped/changed between the time we request them and their arrival. Our lead time for photo samples ranges between 6-8 weeks, but no matter how much time we give we are ALWAYS following up with vendors on a daily basis as the photo shoot approaches to review status and push them to make sure their arrival is timely.
Since fabric isn’t made, dyed, printed, knitted, etc quite yet, vendors will use whatever “available” (this is a term we throw around a lot and refers to fabrics – or other items- that they have immediate access to in their factories or in the market that they can access for small quantity use) fabrics they can find that is as close as possible to what the actual garment will be. Patterns, prints, plaids and such will be digitally printed and can come out looking amazing or can come out looking horrendous, thus why we request more samples than needed.
In some cases, we wind up making photo samples in our office. The shirt below did not get done in time for our upcoming shoot, so we found a solid white tee that was close to the one we are running, printed the design on heat seal transfer paper, and are hand stitching the embellishments and design details. Yeah, I know, it’s seems a little crazy and maybe even ghetto, but let me tell you – it’s better than no sample, and believe me you would be surprised at how well it photographs!
Prepping for Photo Shoot - hand making a photo sample is not an uncommon occurence...
One season we even had to sew a few skorts from scratch…the vendor was able to digitally print the fabric, but was not going to be able to get them cut and sewn in time, so they sent us the fabric and our technical designer whipped up some skorts…not ideal but you do what needs to be done!