Smashing Darling Blog

As you hopefully know, we’ve been blogging for some time now about tips to make your photos better and engaging in critiques to help designers improve their photos. The central idea has always been to help people make their photos (and thereby make their products) look as great as they can, and to boost online sales and marketing efforts.

With the brand new site design, we’ve added a new way to show off designers who are really doing innovative things with their fashion, as well as the photography that they produce to promote it: Chic Boutiques. The Chic Boutique designation is a special brand that we’ll be adding to those boutiques that are cutting edge in all respects: hot fashions, stunning images, strong identity, and lots of products to choose from.

Chic Boutique items will be featured prominently on the home page and item category landing pages, and will include a small “CB” graphic on each photo. Shoppers will also have the opportunity to browse through all of the Chic Boutiques as a group by shopping by boutique, so we hope this will be a great way to feature the designers who we really feel are pushing the indie fashion envelope.

As always, our driving idea behind features like the Chic Boutique (as well as the new site design, and the new look of this blog) is to help promote up and coming designers, and bring to light the hottest new ideas in indie fashion. We thank you all for your support as we continue to grow and evolve.

We’d also love to continue the photo critiques. We realize that the idea of an open critique can be scary, but the ones so far haven’t been so bad, were they? So, who’s next? Suggest someone’s store to be critiqued next week (or volunteer your own) to be critiqued by emailing me at:  julie[at]smashingdarling[dot]com.

We promise to always be nice and offer ideas and suggestions that we genuinely think will help take your photography (and hopefully your sales!) to the next level.