How to create a quality lookbook easily in 2024?

Spring/Summer 2025: the product sheets are twirling and the rays (of sunshine) are shining on your new products. Colors change, customers smile again: the mood is cheerful! A few months earlier, your last fashion show had excited the critics and the influencers had massively "hashtagged" their impressions, the dress or the skirt of the season. The moment of glory is over, but now it's time for the marketing buds and the customers to gather their thoughts. In anticipation of each new release, you assemble the pieces into categories (shoes, bags, pants...), then into coordinated looks, or even into thematic universes. This aggregation of products constitutes your reference base, which will be distributed on different media. These are known by several names:

• Lookbook
• Collection books
• Trending Books
• Posters
• …

Several names, only one objective: to compile and present in a harmonized way all your new products, in order to suggest different themes, styles, silhouettes, trends to your clothes and creations to make customers want to buy. The lookbooks bring your products to life, in photos and images, thanks to the models, to your product offer. By working on the design of your lookbook, your company will be able to present its summer and winter collections, to be present on the web, to propose an application and a situation of the products and thus optimize the product experience online and in store.

If these supports are unconditional to your activity, the problems encountered to achieve them are closely linked to time:

• Deadlines: The marketing date (physical and digital) of your new products has been set for several months and must be rigorously respected. But time is short and product information is sometimes lacking. It's hard to imagine a lookbook with little or no information.

• Quality: The design of these materials is also very complex. You use service providers. You go back and forth on the mock-up projects countless times. You receive changes in product information that you report to your service provider. Finally, in the worst case scenario, you ask for an editable Powerpoint version that you adjust at the last moment before publication.

• Flexibility: Once published, your media are fixed and no longer support occasional or regular updating of content. Unless you start from scratch with these time-consuming and tedious tasks, you have not yet found a way to serenely automate the updating of your lookbooks, which results in rapidly obsolete content and compromises the accuracy of what you are communicating.

• Costs: Generating your collection presentations generates significant costs which are however unavoidable as they embody the image of your brand. Man-days, service providers, delivery delays, successive printings are as many steps as costs that can be optimized.

Why create a lookbook?

The lookbook is a great communication tool for the teams that act for the brand (sales, media, influencers, community & social media manager...). Very simply, everyone can consult the :

• Available colours
• High-definition visuals
• Sketches and patterns
• Materials and technical descriptions (size, length of a skirt or dress...)
• ... and any other information that will enhance your brand

Your lookbook is the official reference for the products that make up your new collection. The product team, the purchasing team, the marketing team, the e-commerce team, the management team, etc. all rely on your lookbook, whether it is digital or printed.

To develop, some brands also make their lookbook available to their sales representatives as a support in their relationship with distributors. Indeed, this stylized and representative compilation of your brand, gives more desire to sell your articles.

Think about your customers and promote your lookbook on your websites (institutional and E-Commerce) but also in your stores. It's the perfect opportunity to innovate and seduce a clientele that is more and more informed, volatile and whose buying path becomes more complex from collection to collection. Enhancing this support on a tablet or digital terminal and then publishing it on satin paper, which can be consulted on a display stand, will reinforce the customer experience with your brand.

Prepare the creation of your lookbook

To facilitate your work, the best way to improve your process is to standardize and centralize your product data. The PIM (Product Information Management) is a solution that has already convinced the fashion industry, both in the luxury and ready-to-wear sectors. It is the starting point to build a lookbook easily. Through PIM, all your marketing teams collaborate to enrich product information within the same interface. They thus have a unique database where your product data is updated in real time. From PIM, you can link your items together to work by looks, collections or categories (shoes, accessories, etc.), while integrating their high-definition photographs. Your product photos have never looked so good in your lookbook.

GUIDE : How to create a lookbook from Quable's PIM?

1. Let's define together the model of your lookbook

The whole point of using PIM to generate your lookbook lies in the possibility of automating each of your creations.

To do this, you will need to draw up the model of your lookbook by asking yourself the right questions:

• What content? Does my lookbook cover my entire product range? One or more collections? One or more product categories? A set of products? Do you need to publish a single product sheet? It's possible!
• How should your elements be arranged? Do photographs appear on a full page or in thumbnails? What character limit do you give to text descriptions?
• What is the graphic layout? Do you apply an illustrated background? What borders? What fonts?
• What rules? If some information is missing from a section of articles, what do you want to replace it with?

Once this framework is erected, Quable's PIM inserts the product information to generate your lookbook in an instant. Quable's teams are with you every step of the way to ensure the success of your future reference material.

2. Style your lookbook

Once the architecture of your lookbook has been validated, your graphic teams or your creative agency now have a document template that they can dress up with your illustrations. It is now their turn to customise it to your brand's image. Once you have validated it you send us this template, which is ready to receive your data and media.

3. Your lookbook is available

Everything is ready! You can now generate your lookbook on demand and in 1 click from PIM. Just press a button and all your content and media are automatically inserted into your lookbook. Available in .pdf format, you are now free to distribute it as is or to send it to your printer to enhance it in paper format.

4. OPTIONAL] Deploy your lookbook internationally

If you are established in international markets, you can also easily deploy your lookbook in foreign languages (English or others). The PIM allows you to integrate existing multilingual versions or to translate directly the data of your product sheets from our integrated Textmaster translation plugin. All you have to do is integrate the translations into your lookbook template to make it available in as many languages as you want. Special cases: If a foreign market is subject to specific data (photographs, texts or different organizations), which modify the initial format, we adapt the template for each specificity.

Conclusion

The lookbook is the essential asset of your brand for each collection release. It unites your teams, influences consumers and facilitates the sale of your products to distributors by highlighting the looks, styles and silhouettes created by the stylists. It brings your products to life through images and photos that enhance and inspire your customers and distributors. Working on your product data from PIM allows you to save time in its design and toautomate its production. The fear of last minute updates is over because at any time and in one click, you regenerate your lookbook without intermediate steps, with peace of mind and productivity.

You want to generate and automate the creation of your lookbook to boost your sales? Ask for your free demo.