Model Realviews
Model realviews
Zazzle's Model Realviews are the first-ever application of motion picture special effects technologies to e-commerce. We've taken thousands of photographs of models in various poses to create a one-of-a-kind experience for designing and selling retail quality apparel on-demand. Now, you can design a t-shirt on a real person and choose exactly which model your design is featured on. This is just the beginning...
Choose your model
We wanted to make this real. Not just the glamorous models you'd see in a New York fashion show (though we have those). Not just cute smiling kids and babies (though we have those too). We've got models of every age, shape, color, and size - from newborns to grandparents and everything in between.
Strike a pose
When you look through a traditional catalog, by page five you've seen the same models over and over, looking straight ahead, smiling gently. Models should be having fun, looking relaxed, looking real. So we started with that standard, straight-ahead shot. But with every model, we took it further, taking shots to really capture the personalities.
Change the shirt color
Every t-shirt design can be placed on over 250 styles and colors of apparel. When you preview your shirts, the color has to be just right. Using our proprietary technology, we take a special color wheel and blend that with our original shots to produce perfectly calibrated colors for every style and color you see.
Sell and merchandise your designs
When selling your designs on Zazzle, context is key. A great design is the first step, great merchandising will get you to the next level. With Model Realviews, you can, for the first time, match your design to your model and match your model to your target customers. Never again will you have to try to sell your designs on just a flat t-shirt!
How'd we do it?
This started with a challenge from Bobby - How could we show how amazing your finished product would be online? Especially since we hadn't made it yet?
Our team of engineering experts got together and researched motion picture special effects, photographic techniques, and on-demand imaging to see whether this would even be possible.
Then we got to work. We started with unique t-shirts filled with reflective dots. During the photo shoot, specialized lighting and reflective materials were used to capture thousands of specialized model shots. From there, we went into image processing - the computers were running for weeks taking each image and detecting the contour, folds, and lighting of the shirt. And then it produced a final image, stripping out any dots, and stitching together the threads of the t-shirt.
With this in progress, we built a back-end server farm ready and willing to create and render all of these images on-demand - everywhere you see them on Zazzle, and out on the web.
Many, many months of hard work has all come together to bring your designs to life. Finally, your designs on Zazzle will look every bit like the real thing.
Model Realviews are patent pending.
