What goes in to shooting a collection? Here's a little run down of what goes on and a behind the scenes look at our recent Autumn/winter 17 photoshoot.

A good month or so in advance, our fantastic PR Maria from Luminate PR gives me a gentle nudge (ferocious kick) to ensure all the hats are ready and to ask about the colour palette. This is with a view to arranging outfits for the lifestye shots of our model.....who we need to get booked in around about this time too. PR also get cracking on looking for a venue for the shoot - to date we've usually favoured lifestyle venues (hotels, museums etc) instead of a studio shoot - but this won't always be the case, just depends on the image requirement (and budget). Add photographer and hair/makeup artist....and we're ready to go.

For our AW17 shoot we decided to use Sloans - Glasgow's oldest bar and restaurant - as it has some beautiful function spaces filled with dark wood, traditional style and a beautiful staircase. This fitted well with the autumn/winter vibe and our collection colour palette of cream and mocha. Glasgow Bridal Boutique Melle Cloche provided us with some Ghost bridesmaids dresses to dress our model, Soph. The dream team: my favourite photographer - Laura Elizabeth Patrick and unbeatable makeup artist - Lesley at Pamper & Polish were also booked for the day to make things dazzle.

First hour or so involves a quick look at each of the hats against our model to see if hair up or hair down is going to be best for each style - we can then plan a shoot order to work around hair styles (so we're not having to redo hairstyles each time we move on to the next hat). Once this is done - we leave make up artist extraordinaire to work her magic on Soph. While that's going on Laura explores the different areas on the venue to test light with different shots... I occasionally get dragged along to be the test subject in the photo - and this makes me enormously uncomfortable as I HATE getting my picture taken. Thankfully, on this shoot I had my friend and marketing genius David along to help...so he was drafted in for this role instead.

Hair, makeup, light testing, model dressing done - photos get taken. Final photos are sent on by Laura a few weeks later (although she usually sends a sneaky preview!).