Styling to Elevate Your Product Photography
Engaging product photography takes more than thoughtful lighting and technical skill, elevated photography needs experienced product styling to bring your product to life and engage your customer. Whether on-model or off-model, consumer packaged goods or fashion, styling is a necessary part of any successful ecommerce shoot. It takes good planning, the right tools and a thoughtful approach.
Make a Plan
Planning and preparation are key to any ecommerce shoot—preparing your product and looks ahead of time make your shoot more efficient and intentional. If possible, schedule a prep day prior to your shoot–a day where you can hang or lay out your product, steam, stuff, or remove packaging. This will allow full focus on shooting and styling the product on the day of the shoot and allow you to shoot more products throughout the day. You can also use this day to process your samples to ensure all products have arrived at the studio or you can use this as a style-out day to put together your looks for an on-model shoot.
On-model photography shoots can often have many people on-set and you don’t want the models and entire crew to be waiting around on styling decisions.
Style Guides are Essential
Prior to the shoot, create a style guide with visual examples and clear notes on each product category that you’ll be shooting. Pants may be styled differently than shorts, and jackets may be styled differently than shirts. It’s best to sort these things out ahead of time so you have clear direction and can get right down to business.
“The key to a successful product shoot is a clear and concise style guide,” says Monica Baronia, a stylist with 10 years of experience and co-founder of Hyperblack Studios. “Without proper direction, it can make it difficult to know what exactly a client wants. Here at Hyperblack, we understand how essential it is to have a style guide tailored to each of our clients so that we can provide them with high end product photography.”
A style guide should provide reference photos for each category with notes like how to fold a product, the shape of the arms and collar, and if buttons should be open or closed.
Think Outside the (Styling) Box
A stylist’s tool belt can include anything from arts and crafts supplies to household items. Successful stylists know how to elevate photography by being creative and using anything and everything to manipulate the product to get the look they’re trying to achieve. From pins to trash bags to chop sticks, anything can be used as a styling aid! We’ve tightened denim when it was fitting too large on models by putting an empty water bottle around the waistband. It worked so much better than a standard clip because it pulled the denim in a more organic way—making it look more filled out in the entire hip area instead of just tightening at the waist.
Denim fit is so important to a customer. Clipping or finding other creative ways to get the right fit will help increase conversion.
Each type of product and each brand may need a different approach. Think of what you’re trying to achieve and then test out different tools until you match the look and feel you’re going for.
Think Like Your Customer
High end product photography should not only look beautiful but also convert to sales. That means styling with the consumer in mind. “As a consumer myself, I always try to showcase the key details of the product I'm styling while still trying to incorporate the art and style of product photography. Something as simple as styling a t-shirt with a little movement can easily show the consumer how the fabric would feel.” Baronia says.
Think about what’s important to the customer—are you styling and shooting in a manner that shows off your unique selling proposition? Are you styling to consistently and accurately represent your product? A well styled product should never compromise the fit or shape of the product. If a product is particularly wide, don’t pin back so much that the design of the product is skewed–this will result in increased returns. There’s a balance to beauty and accuracy and you never want to compromise accuracy for the sake of making it look good.
Build Trust with Consistency
Elevated photography should also aim for styling consistency. This will help build trust with your customers and reduce your return rates. If the same product style is styled differently between different style variants, the customer loses trust and may prevent them from converting to a sale. Baronia goes on to say that live view in photo software Capture One is one of her favorite styling tools because it helps so much in keeping products consistent while you’re on set.
Styling consistency helps build trust with your customer.
THE FINAL WORD
Successful ecommerce photography is all about striking a perfect balance between the art and style of product photography and keeping the natural product design. Preparing your product, having access to the right styling aids, and being thoughtful of the end-user are the key ingredients to elevating your product.
Looking to elevate your photography? Request a quote from us here!
