Gift Box and Subscription Boxes are my HANDS DOWN FAVORITE type of brand photos to date. My passion for beautiful textures and color combinations explodes when I see a carefully crafted gift that pulls in so many different products into one cohesive gift. Hats off to the gift box pros among us!!
Recently, I was honored to take photos for Live to Give. It’s a gift box company based in Iowa that is more than a business to the owner and her family. They pray for the recipient of the box while assembling it and even her 91-year-old grandmother helps in the process! They donate to many charities from the proceeds and use this business to bless others. Their about section on Etsy says their mission is “to give to others, to pray for others, and to love others.” How awesome is that!?
Anyways, the owner needed 4 boxes photographed for their Etsy shop and website. The neat thing is that the boxes were 2 different themes that come in 2 different sizes to accommodate their customers. The two themes were “Mom Era” just in time for Mother’s Day and encouragement for those in their “IVF” journey.
Here are the 3 types of brand photos we focused on: Lifestyle, solid backdrop, and styled flat lays. The owner left a lot of leeway for creative license which made this project even more fun. I’ll explain each one in more detail and show you examples so you can see what that could look like for you and your company.
Lifestyle photos are simply pictures of your products in a real-life setting. For Live to Give, I used a porch swing with pale yellow and gray pillows because there were a lot of yellow accents used in the boxes and the owner mostly wanted a neutral palette for the backdrop. A porch swing also seems like the perfect place to open your box and enjoy the items inside. We also used natural wood accents (flooring and accent tables) to showcase the fun colors used in the items, a kitchen backdrop to focus on cups (since that would be a very normal place to find cups.) Oftentimes, lifestyle photos include models. We decided on only one model photo for this shop to showcase the cup being used in another typical fashion- in a car. Typically, you don’t see a lot of gift box companies use models but there are a lot of ways to include them if you would like to! It goes back to the idea that people buy what they can imagine using. By showing a model using the items in a gift box, it takes the guess work out of it for the customer. We’ve done photos of model hands holding boxes, tying ribbon around the box to show the preparation, and sitting while using the items. It really is a personal preference when it comes to gift boxes.
Solid backdrop photos are common for Amazon types of sales. They almost exclusively have a solid white or colored backdrop. Usually, you will see a white backdrop (especially at Amazon) but you will also see every color under the sun. We used white to accent the IVF box because the color scheme was more vibrant. Likewise, we used a gray backdrop with the more neutral colors of the Mom Era box.
Finally, styled flat lays show the box with props or decor around it. It’s important that the items around the box aren’t so large or bold that they detract from the box. The items should also “make sense” for whatever is in the box. You wouldn’t put flowers around a box of baseball cards because the two usually have nothing in common. In the image below, we used the confetti squares that were included in the gift box as an accent because it’s like a party in a box.
Here are a few more photos of Live to Give’s INCREDIBLE talent! Enjoy :) To see more of their work, check out livetogiveshop.com.
