Tea Collection

Here’s the Tea Collection winter catalog. I’m lucky enough to work closely with multiple departments at Tea. In addition to making their images look their best, I help with their creative operations. For instance I manage project requests from other teams like marketing, site, wholesale, and others.
As a result, the product design team, the folks that actually design the clothes, occasionally share some print-outs of their designs from previous seasons. My family uses these prints for all kinds of projects. My boys love them for coloring and my wife and I use them for projects you might have seen if you follow my wife’s Instagram. If not, she’s linked here.

This is our first post-pandemic catalog and it was a true labour of love. It contains more beautiful Santorini, Greece imagery, but the story of how these were pics were made is even cooler! Five families from all over the world came together for a week of fun and playfulness. Their story is blogged about below.

Click here to read the blog.

You can’t really go wrong with imagery from the stunning island of Santorini, Greece and clothing from Tea Collection.
These are the last couple of catalogs for which I traveled to the printing press and attended press checks. Press checks are when you visit the press while your catalog is being printed. It’s a fascinating and stressful experience.
Imagine this – you’re on-call all day and night in the midst of winter, just before Christmas in Milwaukee 2019. It’s 12 degrees (F). You get a call at your hotel at 2am asking you to show up at the press in 30 minutes. Your host meets you at the door of a seemingly quiet building in a quiet part of town. He opens the door and walks you through an enormous warehouse where, despite the vibe outside, work is happening at a furious pace. People and forklifts zip in front and behind you as you are led through huge presses creating catalog pages for other brands – some furniture, some cosmetics, some architecture. You see some folded pages flying down tracks, others being sorted into piles by huge robotic arms, and other, seeming rejects, stuffed into large bins. It’s a bit overwhelming. Then you come up to an enormous machine pumping out thousands of pages per minute of a catalog that you know intimately and worked on for months before this moment. The press workers bring you copies of the catalog pages (literally) hot-off-the-press. You then make color adjustment decisions while thousands of pages are zipping and humming all around you – make the skin on this one warmer… take some cyan out of this background… add some weight to these blacks to add contrast. Thanks to all involved who help create these beautiful, ephemeral works of art.

teacollection.com

The clothing in these images were designed by a team whose members trace their roots to Poland, Taiwan, and India to name a few. The clothing was manufactured in China, Vietnam, and Peru. The images were conceived in the USA and shot in Greece featuring kids and families from Italy, Spain, Australia, and the USA. It’s pretty cool to think about that as we work on these images.