Studio Notes
Why your lookbook is a sales document first
Buyers spend eleven seconds on a first look. Everything after that is sequencing, not photography — and most brands get the order exactly backwards.
Elise Marchand
·
6
min read
A buyer opens your lookbook on a laptop between two appointments. They are not reading. They are scanning for the three pieces they can defend to their own merchandiser, and they are doing it in about eleven seconds.
Sequence beats styling
Most brands sequence a lookbook by shoot day, or by whatever order the samples arrived. Buyers read it by delivery window and price tier. Those are almost never the same order, and the mismatch costs you the hero pieces — they end up on page nineteen, behind six variations of the same shirt.
Open on the piece with the highest margin and the clearest silhouette. Follow it with the two items that complete a look around it. Then break to the next window. If a page cannot answer “what would I put this with,” it is doing decorative work in a commercial document.
One image per decision
Every look needs a full-length frame that reads at thumbnail size and a detail frame that justifies the price — the seam, the button, the lining. Anything beyond those two is a second choice you are asking a busy person to make.
We cut roughly a third of the frames from every lookbook we sequence. Nobody has ever asked for them back.
Elise Marchand
Founder & Creative Director
Elise founded Mavoryne in 2014 after eight years directing campaigns in Paris and Antwerp. She leads concept and casting on every project the studio takes.
