Back-to-school stationery campaign photography for Elmer's, Sharpie, Paper Mate, Expo and Dymo

We photographed the back-to-school stationery ranges for five Newell brands — Elmer's, Sharpie, Paper Mate, Expo and Dymo — produced through their parent company, Newell Australia, for the ANZ back-to-school campaign. The work was shot and art-directed by Lisa Saad, Principal Photographer at Gotham Studios Melbourne.

Back-to-school campaigns involve a broad mix of stationery products that must be photographed, approved and delivered within a fixed seasonal schedule. Here that mix spanned five distinct brands, each with its own colour palette, product categories and brand identity, all running under a single shared campaign platform.

The brief

Photograph the back-to-school stationery ranges shown in the supplied campaign artwork, creating consistent product imagery for use across retail catalogues, ecommerce and promotional material.

The work also included campaign imagery for big-box back-to-school activity — Officeworks, Woolworths, Kmart and Big W — featuring selected products with school-age talent.

The challenge — consistency across a broad and varied range

Back-to-school ranges are wide: many different product types, formats, materials and finishes, all needing to sit together as one coherent campaign.

Five brands under one campaign is a harder problem than one brand with five ranges. Each brand has its own established colour identity, its own product categories and its own visual conventions — but the campaign has to hold together as a single back-to-school platform when the assets appear side by side in a catalogue or in-store. The photography has to serve both: brand-correct individually, campaign-consistent collectively.

Then there was maintaining consistent lighting, scale and colour accuracy across a large and varied seasonal range. Scale is the one people underestimate — a pencil case and a pen photographed at their own "correct" size will look wrong next to each other on a catalogue page unless the relationships are controlled deliberately.

Colour accuracy matters commercially. A customer comparing a product online or in a catalogue to the item on the shelf notices any difference immediately.

And the campaign schedule was fixed. Back-to-school activity is locked to a season, so the production had to run efficiently to meet it.

How we solved it

We worked to a controlled, consistent setup across the range so that lighting, scale and colour held from one product to the next — the thing that makes a catalogue page look designed rather than assembled.

The work focused primarily on clean product photography, covering both individual items and grouped range images suitable for retail catalogue, ecommerce and campaign applications.

Alongside the product work, we photographed selected products with school-age talent for the big-box back-to-school campaigns. (Note: working with young talent brings its own production requirements — scheduled breaks, supervision and shorter working windows — which shape how the day is planned.)

Colour was managed through capture and post-production so the products were represented accurately rather than simply vividly.

The result

The final imagery created a consistent visual presentation across the seasonal stationery ranges, with accurate colour, clear product detail, and files suitable for the required catalogue, ecommerce and campaign applications.

Why this matters for your brand

Broad seasonal ranges are won on consistency, not on individual hero shots. If your products will appear together — on a catalogue page, a range page, a retail campaign — then lighting, scale and colour need to be controlled as a system across the whole range, not optimised product by product.

And if your campaign needs both clean product imagery and talent-based lifestyle work, brief them into one production. Splitting them across two suppliers is how a campaign ends up looking like two campaigns.

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Credits

This photography was produced and art-directed by Lisa Saad, Principal Photographer at Gotham Studios Melbourne. Our team coordinated all logistics, art direction, talent and styling, and produced the shoot as requested by the client. Gotham Studios Melbourne. We are your photographers. www.lisasaad.com