It’s the Monday after a release which means everyone who was my best friend last week is suddenly my worst enemy. “LOL”s have turned into “FML,” from both Twitter and UPS (they don’t like picking up all these boxes). 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 Ronnie’s 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 photo shoot 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 Ronnie’s 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 – Ronnie was in full agreement. 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.

This one isn’t super exciting other than the fact that I got to lay in the street. A FedEx truck almost hit me, and you can see my super sick shooting bag where I kept the New Balance 998GNRs that I shot right after. But that’s the real dumpster that I dug the pallets out of.

Here we are again: different day, same set up. This time you get to see the step stool that I use for above shots because I’m a paltry 5’7″ and need that height to get a photo where everything’s in frame. My shooting bag was indisposed at the time, so I had to use a Kith bag.

Here you can see the step stool in position for use, the Evil Truck that came after me, and a very sad tree that undoubtedly would have broken Bob Ross’ heart.