A digital lookbook delivers a sleek digital shopping experience
Creating an online fashion lookbook allows ecommerce merchants and fashion retailers to deliver an immersive, shoppable experience to readers.
A flipbook style lookbook with embedded videos gives customers a chance to see how the outfits you showcase would look in real life.
What is a lookbook?
A digital lookbook is a collection of photos, compiled in an online format, to showcase your designs and outfit inspo. Lookbooks are thus immensely helpful to start your fashion or photography business.
Good lookbooks include high quality pictures and text. The photos should be mostly lifestyle shots that show outfits and accessory combos in the real world. The text should go beyond simple descriptions and bring the reader into the vision behind your brand.
Unlike a catalog, a lookbook is about more than just selling. It’s about showcasing your aesthetics. By putting a lookbook online you can have the best of both worlds: a shoppable catalog experience with the creativity of a lookbook.
While a traditional lookbook would typically involve print and distribution costs, the digital lookbook is much more versatile. Not only is it cost-efficient and environmentally-friendly, but it can also include interactive features, such as shoppable links to your products.
An online fashion lookbook sets your designs and styles in motion and gives customers a sense of what it would be like to wear these outfits in day-to-day life.
A digital lookbook is readable on any device, and delivers high-resolution images on any type of screen.
How to make a lookbook:
Simply upload the PDF of your design to create a lookbook (Or you can upload .doc, .docx, or .ppt file types or import your files directly from Dropbox or Google Drive).
Use the flipbook feature to present your lookbook online in a visually stunning format that replicates the look and feel of a classic print lookbook with the convenience of a digital format.
Bring your digital lookbook to life by adding features that jump off the page, like online shopping links and videos.
Be sure to connect your digital lookbook with the rest of your content assets by adding it to your site with our embed feature.
Increase the visibility of your lookbook online by distributing it through your social channels and linking to it from your blog.
InDesign
Create a lookbook with your existing design tools.
With Issuu’s InDesign extension, you can create a lookbook as a visual story for Facebook, Instagram, and other social channels.
It’s easy. Just select “File”-> “Issuu- Create Story” to start creating your Visual Stories in InDesign.
Visual Stories
Design with social in mind.
Issuu’s Visual Stories feature is a drag-and-drop solution that can turn your lookbook into a professional quality social media asset. This feature lets you share your lookbook to your social channels directly from Issuu.
Video
Make your lookbook a multimedia experience.
Go beyond the static lookbook and show your looks in action by embedding videos. With this feature, you can add videos from YouTube and Vimeo to your online fashion lookbook with just a few clicks.
See more digital lookbook examples on Issuu:
Digital Lookbook: Frequently Asked Questions
The purpose of a lookbook is to give customers an idea of how clothes and fashion accessories look in the real world and as parts of outfits and ensembles.
Lookbooks are an excellent marketing tool for the fashion industry. They help create a desire for items by showing customers how they might fit into their lives and existing wardrobe. By showing off complete looks, a lookbook presents opportunities for cross-selling and upselling to customers who want to “complete the look”.
Designing an online fashion lookbook with Issuu is super easy. You can either create a PDF or other file format with your favorite design software and upload it, or you can transfer your work using our InDesign integration.
While very similar, there are a few differences between a catalog and lookbook. A catalog is a list of items available for sale whereas a lookbook showcases your products. Catalogs include product descriptions, sizing info, prices, and images. They tend to be more text-heavy than a lookbook because their main purpose is to provide product information.
A lookbook is more visual. It’s designed to inspire customers to picture themselves in the outfits featured.
With Issuu’s shoppable links, you can create a lookbook that gives you the shopability of a catalog with the visual appeal of a lookbook.
Great lookbooks start with great photos. Luckily, you don’t have to be a master photographer or have a huge photography budget to take great lookbook photos. You can even get quality images with your smartphone. Just keep in mind these best practices for taking photos.
Pay attention to backgrounds, colors, and locations. These elements are essential to the vibe you want to create with your lookbook.
Find good light. The best light for professional and non-professional photographers alike, is natural light.
You don’t need a big crew or professional models. In fact, studies have shown that images that look like phone pics perform 200% better in social media campaigns.
See what else we can build together:
