Kids Clothier French Toast Pioneers a Pandemic-Era Necessity: The Socially Distanced Photo Shoot

Now that the United States has begun to reopen, apparel brands are hoping for the return of shoppers—and perhaps even permitting themselves to think optimistically about their autumn collections. After all, fall is just around the corner, and many shoppers start looking for chilly weather clothing as early as July.

But as with so many other facets of business, the pandemic hasn't just changed shopping patterns but marketing, too.

Few brands are feeling that shift as acutely as French Toast. As a maker of accessibly priced school clothes for kids, the 35-year-old label stakes much of its vitality on back-to-school shopping. And since parents will start thinking about school clothes in just a few weeks, now's the time to get the creative work done, since it's all scheduled to go live on June 30.

The question was: Where do you even begin? Nobody's sure when kids will be heading back to school, much less what school's going to look like once they get there. And thanks to social-distancing mandates, creative directors can't even set up shoots the way they used to.

The necessity to produce new assets, yet do it in a way that's both thematically and epidemiologically appropriate to the times, led French Toast into wholly uncharted territory: the pandemic-appropriate photo shoot.

Matthew Buesing, vp of customer and digital marketing, said that as soon as America went into lockdown at the end of March, it was obvious that the traditional photo shoot wasn't going to happen.

"When we got through that initial first phase of the quarantine, we said: 'We have to throw the book out. Everything we've done in the past is now out the window,'" he said.

The first things to change were the theme and setting of the creative work. Traditionally, photo shoots for back-to-school collections feature groups of grinning kids clowning on the school bus, sitting in classrooms and frolicking on the playground.

"That's exactly what we used to do—paint this idyllic picture of school," Buesing said. "And that was good. That was fine for years. But these changes have accelerated our positioning."

And so the first thing that French Toast's creative director changed was the venue. At locations in Longmeadow, Mass., the Bronx borough of New York City and the New Jersey suburb of West New York, kids sporting French Toast's back-to-school looks would be shown not in classrooms or the school cafeteria, but in wide-open spaces like parks, sidewalks and even their own front yards.

But switching to nontraditional locations was relatively easy compared to the next hurdle: How do you run a professional shoot when nobody—models, stylists, photographers—can get within six feet of one another?

Pulling off a socially distanced photo session required several new protocols. Most of the young models appear by themselves and, in cases where group was needed, the kids clustered only with siblings who live under the same roof. Meanwhile, parents held down styling duties. Art direction took place via FaceTime and Zoom and, much of the time, it was mom taking the photos on her iPhone. Finally, since nobody's sure if face masks will be compulsory once it's time to go back to school, the kids donned masks for some shots and went mask-less for others.

One unanticipated benefit of all of these makeshift procedures was that the creative work had an authenticity to it that's rarely seen in catalog shots. Stripping away all of the layers of production yielded a product that looked more like the everyday pics you'd put on Instagram and felt like an outgrowth of the current times—since, in fact, that's pretty much what all of it was.

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