The Sunset Sessions
The Sunset Sessions represents authentic California lifestyle & 60s-90s vintage fashion which embraces (and originally inspired by) photography, design, boardriding culture and philanthropy. It is an original brand and creative service for which I’d been responsible for full identity/branding program through all creative direction since first inception in 2013 through operations to 2018. Since it had never existed prior, I was faced with task of not only creating entire branding, content from scratch but to also built an entire organic social network across all social platforms and drive traffic to engagement points—whether as a customer, partner, collaborator or client.
The Sunset Sessions is more heavily focused on fashion and action sports categories; follows a mission to help promote natural beauty, green fashion and philanthropy while simultaneously encouraging a positive, inspirational women's social community. Part of the mandate for creative content developed by, for The Sunset Sessions is to: leave all model(s) physically unretouched in select images, incorporate usage of natural/organic beauty products for photo shoots whenever absolutely possible and to feature, promote fashions from the styling wardrobe which are vintage and/or produced eco-consciously, made locally in California. The Sunset Sessions collaborates with and aims to help promote other women artists, creatives, fashion designers, entrepreneurs, athletes, models and thought leaders.
An original website & e-commerce shop was built to sell merchandise; many of the original fashions available for sale are special styling pieces used in wardrobe for professional photo shoots, while fashion editorials, lookbooks I’d creative, art directed with talented teams have also been developed to showcase exclusive seasonal collections featuring vintage statement pieces.
ROLES: Creative Director, Art Director, Multidisciplinary Designer, Producer, Photographer, Strategist, Fashion Stylist/Editor
SPECIAL THANKS TO ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHERS FEATURED: Heidi Zumbrun, Angela De Cenzo, Tory Rae Thompson
Because The Sunset Sessions only exists online and has no brick and mortar locations—the website/store had to be extended, connected throughout multiple social media platforms to reach a larger global audience, generate brand awareness and advertise unique special items to customers on a very limited marketing budget.
Original custom coded website featuring e-commerce shop with external (Blogger) blog platform
Phase two full website featuring e-commerce shop for both vintage AND original The Sunset Sessions label collections in addition to an integrated blog and archive of fashion editorials embedded within website. The new full site is much visually cleaner and easy to navigate in terms of UI, allows for much deeper e-commerce potential and provides capability to host much greater, scalable content within the same exclusive branded website space:
Since The Sunset Sessions offers rare, authentic and custom merchandise, part of the brand's strategy challenge was communicating these attributes to a wide range of consumer age groups in a post-digital era, without the ability to personally interact face-to-face with customers in a retail shop.
As time passed, the network grew and social media platforms, content evolved, more collections were curated for e-commerce offerings and leveraged social media as a tool to drive traffic to the boutique, other sites for online purchasing:
Direction, production of The Sunset Sessions' original library, beginning with Phase I original vintage collection
PHOTOGRAPHER: Angela De Cenzo
PHOTOGRAPHER: Heidi Zumbrun
Packaging and marketing collateral made from recycled materials including vintage textiles and vinyl records
Phase II original California knitwear collection made ethically in Los Angeles, screen-printed in San Francisco
PHOTOGRAPHER: Tory Rae Thompson
PHOTOGRAPHER: Heidi Zumbrun
Original California knitwear collection also included special screens which partners with non-profit organizations, charitable campaigns to help raise monies, bring awareness to various social causes
Interactive ecosystem developed with all original content, featuring photography, vintage styling, art direction across all social networks, built with all organic followings
Original blogger platform with all original content, featuring photography, vintage styling, art direction and guest bloggers, influencers, collaborators
Phase III Newly updated custom blog platform(integrated into website) alongside new editorial capability; featuring original content, guest features, photography, vintage styling, art direction
The journal and instagram became important ways to help promote a talented network of women and supportive, encouraging community which not only was focused on fashion but grew a much larger ecosystem which revolved around: image making and creative arts, boardriding, natural beauty and philanthropy. The online journal and instagram became method for open-communication, dialogue for others to discover, learn more about emerging talent—providing opportunities for the talent to be showcased. We continued in both journal and instagram features to maintain the mantra of representing natural beauty, keeping a photoshop-free community when it came to images featuring skin and body. We strived to encourage, represent diversity and a range of body types, sizes to maintain a very healthy, real, positive and accepting online community.
PHASE IV Our natural beauty ethos was even applied to external publications’ editorial shoots to which our creative teams submitted photo stories as well in partner collaboration and/or client shoots in which we took part to support with styling and/or photography and we produced, released content off platform which continued to advocate for natural beauty products, unretouched models.
Content required to be conceived, executed at a very fast pace to keep up with demands, pace of contemporary social media—most specifically Instagram and The Sunset Sessions assembled teams of various women creatives to produce original content which ensured that green fashion and natural beauty practices were incorporated into fashion shoots, creative projects.
We partnered with other designers, brands, women entrepreneurs who were also in support of our values and wished to execute visual creative, fashion content which enabled The Sunset Sessions to begin producing greater external projects, scale up capabilities.
