How to prepare and send your product to the studio

October 22, 2026

Almost nobody thinks about this part until the day before shipping, and yet it’s where most session hours get lost. Not in the shipping itself, but in what arrives inside the box.

A photographed product is a handled product: turned, opened, set down, cleaned, placed again. What takes that handling without changing its look gets shot fast. What doesn’t, gets shot slowly.

Here’s the list worth going through before the box is sealed.

How to prepare and send your product to the studio

1 · Send more than one unit of each reference

This saves the most time, and almost nobody does it.

A single unit picks up marks: a rub from the packaging, a fingerprint that won’t come off, a corner knocked in transit. With only one unit that gets cleaned in retouching, and what could have been a clean frame turns into post-production work.

With a spare, the perfect one gets shot and the day moves on. If a reference comes in colour or finish variants, one of each is better: from the outside you never know which one photographs best.

2 · Packaging travels separately, and unopened

If the box, the bag or the label appear in the photos, they need their own unit.

Opened packaging never closes the same way again: the flap stays creased, the seal wrinkled, the adhesive lifted. On a listing that shows. One sealed unit and one opened one cover both situations without inventing anything in retouching.

And a warning that rarely gets expected: freshly printed ink can transfer from the touch of a finger alone. If the packaging is recent, it’s worth saying so, because it changes how it’s handled during the session.

3 · Clean before it ships, not on arrival

Metal, glass and glossy plastics hold the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them. Leather and fabric hold lint.

Cleaning happens at the studio anyway, but that’s session time. Cleaning before shipping costs nothing: a dry cloth for jewellery, a brush for textiles, that’s it.

Clothing travels better folded with paper between the layers than packed tight in a bag. Deep fold marks take time to drop out, and sometimes they don’t.

4 · Tell us which size and which variant we’re shooting

With clothing and footwear, which one arrives matters.

For a mannequin or a flat lay, the middle size represents the garment best. For a shoot with a model, it has to be that person’s size, and that’s decided before booking them, not once everything is at the studio.

If the collection has colours close to each other, label them: the commercial colour name, not an internal reference number nobody can check later.

5 · Perishables get flagged in advance

Food, flowers, opened cosmetics, anything that changes with time or with the heat of the light.

This isn’t a problem, it’s a shooting condition: it changes the order of the day. A product that arrives frozen, for instance, gets photographed frozen first and defrosted after, and there’s no going back: everything that has to be shot in the first state must be settled before anything starts.

The same goes for flowers, which open with the heat, or a cosmetic texture, which spreads on its own. If we know at booking, the day is ordered so the product reaches the camera at its best moment. If we find out when the box is opened, the order is already set.

6 · Show us how it works

If the product opens, folds, clicks together, assembles or is used in a way that isn’t obvious, send a short phone video. It doesn’t need to look good.

This avoids two things: shooting it wrongly assembled, and losing time working out the mechanism. On products with instructions, the image that sells best is usually the gesture itself, and to make it you have to understand it first.

7 · Dimensions and weight, before the date is fixed

A large object isn’t a problem; a large object that turns up unannounced is.

Dimensions decide practical things: whether it fits through the door and into the lift, whether it takes two people to move, what surface and background are needed, how much distance the lens asks for. All of that plans well from a measurement sent by message and badly from a surprise at the entrance.

If the product is fragile or heavy, say that too: it changes who handles it and how.

8 · Decide what happens to the goods afterwards

Return, collection, disposal or storage: all four exist, and it’s better to pick one beforehand.

If the product goes back, we need to know where and with which carrier, and whether the original packaging has to be kept for the return trip. If it stays, that’s agreed at booking. The specific conditions are on the pricing page.