There is an elephant in the room when it comes to apparel mockups: they are too difficult to make. So far, the solution has been the simplest: creating mockups of flat, empty t-shirts. No models, no movement. Until now.
At Bendito we wanted to bridge that gap. But how? By turning a fashion editorial into a collection of mockups. Avoiding any established practice. Teaming up with a highly skilled photographer: Celeste Galanda.
We were in love with Celeste’s work for months. Her art is remarkable in how she works with color and light. It was no surprise for us to find Louis Vuitton, Armani o Dior among her clients.
We believed that by partnering with her, our community would have access to top-notch resources. Resources that are exclusive to well-established brands and those with deep pockets.
As soon as we entered the pre-production stage, we realized fashion photo shoots are difficult to coordinate —and they are costly. You must assemble a team of five or more people to bring any vision into existence. And here’s how it went: picking the right models, talking to agencies, making deals, styling, buying stuff, planning each photo shoot, getting the people ready, and dealing with the travel stuff… Oh geez! It took us a solid month just for pre-production.
1 month of pre-production for 6 hours of shoot.
6 hours to create 33 iconic photos.
We created a schedule that divided the work into 10-minute time slots. We had such familiarity with the steps when we arrived at the shoot in Barcelona, that it felt like a dance. As soon as we finished the photoshoot, a new challenge presented itself. The technical challenge. In Nevada collection, we offer t-shirt mockups, sweatshirt mockups, bucket hat mockups… Just to clarify, creating a poster mock-up is a straightforward process —without any complex curves or fabrics to be concerned about. Clothing mockups though, that’s a different story…
You need to build a mesh in Adobe Photoshop that matches the model’s shape, posture, cloth droops, lines, and texture precisely. To be really frank, there were times we wanted to get rid of a ton of photos. It was a real labor of love, which took hours and hours. Creating a sense of realism is challenging. Our brain’s an expert at spotting any unrealistic stuff!
We figured it was time to grow our team of collaborators, so that we could take our technique to the next level and add more features to our clothes mockups. In Nevada Collection, the mockup’s layer structure has been enhanced to better accommodate the color you assign to the clothes. You can activate and deactivate different layer groups based on the color type you choose.
Was it hard? Yes. These 33 clothing mockups were the toughest we’ve ever created. But they enabled significant growth for us, and they also served a purpose: to release a collection featuring professional models, photographed by a talented photographer, with the aim of making premium apparel mockups more accessible to everyone.
