Quick heads up before we start.

I’d like to share a bit of personal news: I’m the CEO and President of a product photography studio called SHOOTIFY®. I built it together with my partner and co-founder, Anna Gunselman. This post explains why we built it — from my perspective, based on years of working directly with clients and seeing how product images influence buying decisions.

Why We Built Shootify

(Anna Ruiz, Co-Founder)

Before SHOOTIFY®, my work was always centered around real people and real buying decisions.

After years of working directly with clients as a fashion stylist and personal shopper, I saw first-hand how much image quality influences whether someone decides to buy a product or not. Clients didn’t respond only to design — they responded to how clearly and honestly a garment was presented. When images felt accurate and well thought out, buying decisions came easier. When they didn’t, hesitation followed.

What I Kept Seeing in E-Commerce

As I spent more time reviewing online stores, one pattern kept repeating.

Many strong products were shown in ways that didn’t fully explain them. Fit felt unclear. Proportions looked inconsistent. Fabric weight and structure were hard to read. From my experience, I also noticed that incorrect or misleading product representation often leads to high return rates — not because the product is bad, but because expectations were set incorrectly by the images.

At the same time, I saw the opposite problem too. Some brands focused so much on being “honest” that they forgot about visual aesthetics. Images were technically accurate, but visually flat or uninspiring, which also hurt sales.

What works best is balance: honest representation paired with strong visual aesthetics. The product needs to look appealing, but it also needs to look real.

Why Anna and I Built SHOOTIFY®

Together with my co-founder, Anna Gunselman, we built SHOOTIFY ® to create that balance.

We wanted a system where styling and photography work together — where products are shown accurately, but still feel polished and desirable. The goal wasn’t just to make images look good, but to make them useful for decision-making and easy for brands to manage over time.

One System, One Standard

One of the biggest challenges brands face is juggling multiple vendors for different image types. That fragmentation almost always leads to inconsistency.

SHOOTIFY ® was built as an all-in-one solution. Flat lay clothing photography, ghost mannequin photography, and on-model photography are handled in one place, using the same standards every time. This makes the process smoother for brands and easier to maintain as collections grow.

Styling That Supports Real Decisions

In e-commerce, styling isn’t decoration — it directly affects whether a customer feels confident buying.

When garments are styled consistently and realistically, customers understand products faster. They trust what they see, feel more confident checking out, and are less likely to return items later.

Shootify exists because styling and photography shouldn’t stop at the fitting room. They should carry through to the product page — with clarity, intention, and visual balance that supports real buying decisions.

Today, we work across a wide range of categories — from fashion and luxury brands like Alexis, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, and Farfetch, where highest quality and consistency matters deeply, to large-scale retailers like Soccer.com, Best Buy, and Costco, where we photograph thousands of SKUs each year. Seeing this model work across both ends of the spectrum — high-touch luxury and high-volume e-commerce — has been the strongest proof that the system we built at Shootify solves real business needs, not just aesthetic ones.