The brief
Behati sells satin sleepwear — a product that lives or dies on how it looks. Anyone can list garments on a website. The difficulty with this category is that a satin camisole photographed badly looks cheap, and the same camisole photographed well looks like the thing you want to be wearing. The store had to carry that difference the whole way, from the first photograph to the confirmation email.
We took the whole job rather than a slice of it: the brand, the photography, the store itself, and the parts of e-commerce nobody enjoys — payment gateways, courier rates and shipping rules.
Photographing satin is the hard part
Satin is the most difficult common fabric to shoot. It is highly reflective, so a direct light source blows out to a white patch and takes the colour with it. Every crease reads as a fault rather than a fold. And the colour shifts with the angle of the weave, so the same garment can photograph as two different shades in consecutive frames.
The answer is slow and unglamorous. Heavily diffused light instead of direct. Steaming the garment between every single shot. Shooting slightly off-axis so the sheen reads as sheen rather than glare. Colour-checking against the physical garment rather than trusting a screen.
It is worth the hours. Returns in online clothing are driven almost entirely by the gap between what a customer expected and what arrived — and photography is most of that expectation.
The store
Built on WooCommerce, on WordPress. That was the right call for a growing catalogue where the owner wants to add products without paying a platform fee on every sale, and where the product data needs to stay portable if anything changes later.
Sizes and colours are set up as proper variations with stock tracked per variant, so the shop can never sell something it does not have. Payments and delivery run through South African providers, with live courier rates at checkout rather than a flat fee — a customer who sees an honest shipping cost abandons less often than one who finds a surprise at the final step.
The size guide carries real garment measurements in centimetres, not just S, M and L. It is the cheapest thing an apparel store can do to reduce returns, and most of them skip it.
