Pulling Back the Curtain - Anatomy of a Photoshoot

It’s the Monday after a release which means everyone who was my best friend last week is suddenly my worst enemy. The labels have been printed and the shoes are patiently waiting to get to their new homes. And, it means, we at the shop can take a second to take a breath. Orchestrating a release like the one on Friday for the Selvedges requires a lot of work over many days by many people. And we’d like to fill you guys in on what it takes. From sampling, to planning ship dates, receiving, counting, and reconciling, sorting, shooting, planning marketing schedules, executing all these things, and dealing with the dozens of things that go wrong along the way. This time I’d like to show you guys what a photoshoot looks like to get the photos that we ultimately ended up with. The shoot was done over the course of three days. The third day was quite hasty, and for a product we haven’t shown you yet, so I can’t share those, but the other two days are described here. Since my idea behind the shoe was to highlight the heritage of the American work force, we wanted to use something that would visually call to that idea. For me, it was an obvious choice: untreated wood. I remembered some pallets that we had received (the last time we ordered cardboard boxes - for the Ewings and for this release), and thought I could use those. But they were missing when I went to go look for them. Some detective work and I found them in the dumpster in the street that was being used by the construction company that’s refurbishing the exterior of our building. I didn’t want to drag them too far, and it had just rained (needed all the light I could get), so I decided to set up right on Bleecker Street. Below you can see the photos we used, and the set up for each one.