Forty looks, four shoots, one weekend. A small fashion brand can now ship a full seasonal lookbook entirely with AI on a Friday-to-Sunday timeline. Here is the literal day-by-day plan — including the tool stack, the time budget, and the decision points where most teams stall.
What this plan assumes
A small clothing brand with 30–50 SKUs in the season, photo files of every garment (flat-lay phone shots are fine), a brand identity that already has a defined model archetype, and a producer who can work two long days plus a half-day on Sunday. No external photographer, no studio booking, no retoucher.
Friday: prep and planning
Friday is structure work. The shoot does not start until the plan is locked.
- Pick the model approach: a preset, an uploaded reference photo, or a creator photo set from the marketplace. Do not change this once the weekend starts.
- Lock the aspect ratios. 4:5 for the lookbook PDF + Shopify PDP, 9:16 for Stories, 1:1 for grid view.
- Group SKUs into shoot batches by garment type and framing (for example: outerwear / mid-shot, dresses / full-body, knitwear / close-up).
- Pre-flight upload all garment files into Apiway. Test one generation against the chosen model and confirm the output quality before committing the batch.
Saturday: the shoot
Saturday is the volume day. Run batches of 8–12 shots each, with a 15-minute break between batches to review outputs.
For catalog shots: use White Studio. Pure-white background pipeline runs automatically. One credit per shot.
For lifestyle shots: use Virtual try-on on top of the chosen creator photo set. The Hollywood-anchor pattern keeps the lifestyle imagery believable without sliding into pure-AI plastic.
For ghost-mannequin catalog filler: use Ghost mannequin. Useful for products where the brand does not want a face on every catalog tile.
Saturday evening: cull and re-shoot
Pull all outputs into a folder and review on a single screen. Mark each shot keep / re-shoot / discard. Re-shoot the marked ones with a small prompt or framing tweak. Most batches need a 10–20% re-shoot rate; budget for it in advance.
Total Saturday output: 60–100 finished shots covering the full SKU range across catalog, lifestyle, and ghost mannequin.
Sunday: the deliverables
Sunday is layout and packaging. Drop the chosen shots into the lookbook layout, the Shopify PDPs, and the social content pack. No new generation work unless you find a gap.
- Lookbook PDF: 20–40 pages of finished imagery, dropped into a pre-existing template.
- Shopify catalog: 4 shots per SKU uploaded across the collection.
- Social content pack: 30–50 9:16 and 1:1 variants for the next 4 weeks of organic and paid posts.
Real cost and time budget
Compute: roughly 200–400 credits across the weekend, depending on regeneration rate. (Pricing recap: one credit equals one US cent.) Operator time: roughly 22–28 hours across the weekend. Studio bookings: zero. External fees: zero.
Compare this to a traditional studio season shoot — two days of studio rental, two days of model fees, a photographer, a stylist, a hair-and-makeup artist, a retoucher — and the cost gap runs five-figure dollars and several weeks of calendar.
Try the prep step this Friday
The prep step alone is worth running on a Friday afternoon. Pick the model approach, lock the aspect ratios, batch the SKUs, and run one test generation. Free accounts ship with 100 one-time credits — enough for the prep.