21ST OCTOBER – 28TH OCTOBER

This week was all about Ballin Every Season. With the long on going speculation about rebranding the old website we also wanted to reshot the entire collection, therefore all the clothes have cohesive background. Previously there were pictures from various of shoots different by each previous drops. Product photography is quite a challenge for me as it is quite hard to make the clothes as much as appealing as possible laying down flat.

Further more I had to redesign the whole web – we were still unsure if we would use Shopify or use secondhand company. There was clear push from their side for us to grab. What I did not like was that there was this slight manipulation of “you will get paid now”. And the impatience in my coworker Ibrahim to have a profit was visible, however in the long run we would be loosing some authorship over the merch and as well percentage. We are already paying percentage to people who do our export .

(re-designed example by the other company – look of our old web)

Behind the scenes, we were having real debates about how to move forward with the website—whether to sell out for convenience or build something from scratch that actually represents us.
 The example they sent us was once again bait old school and the template they were going from was very restrictive. As well as the idea of being reliant on other party if urgent things are needed is never a good idea. So at last we went with Shopify and built it ourselves. It meant more work, no extra pay, but I wanted to learn, and I believed in it.

While building it there was a certain time restrained but I was trying to be as consistent and not get distracted with other work so we meet our agreed deadline. We did over ran it at last. I used other street fashion brands as inspiration. Trying to find what would suit our brand in style. As presents in shopify were quite restricting I used custom code to do the moving masquerade on top, cover image with custom button and more. The products site design it self was a plugin that we then adjusted accordingly. There needed to be a slot as well for trainings and kemps. Those two pages I fully designed with custom blocks. I am not super expert with coding but with help of AI and working through whenever the code has mistakes and asking the right question, I achieved what I was content with.

Besides that there needed to be advertisement prepared for when we do the update. The “New Website” discount went live, the visuals were sharper, and everything felt like it was finally starting to align.

(3D laptop render with screenplay I used in the final promo video of the new website drop)