Advertising seems to be the hardest part

My main failure from the t-shirt collection is advertising. As of yet, nobody has told me that my shirts are crap and I have enough people around me, that would tell me if the shirts were in fact bad. On the contrary, people that have bought my shirts have given me feedback that they are surprised about the good quality. As if organic, fairtrade shirts for about 30 Euro cannot be that good. Well, my costing is quite tight and my margin low. In any way, mouth to mouth advertising does not work as good as I had hoped. Now, it is not the time for t-shrts anymore (baby, it's cold outside). With that I need to come up with a good advertising campaign. And the first step was a fotoshooting. And let me tell you, getting the pictures done the way I wanted was more difficult as I would have thought.

• Getting the location: At first I looked at lost places but in the end this is not a viable option considering my accountability and the risk of doing a strickly speaking illeagal shooting, where people potentially get hurt. Alternatively I contacted various places, but either they were way out of my price league (>1000€) or they just would not allow a shooting. I have to admit, I was rather disappointed in the BVG (Berlins public transport company), who are knows for their own creativity and great advertising/ social media. When I asked if there is an old or unused location, I could rent to shoot I was shut down right away, despite a rather recent article (https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/berlin/verkehr/u-bahn-netz-die-toten-tunnel-von-berlin-26733378) about said locations. The BVG referred me to the Bahn, who referred me to another institution and so on. In the end I found a less than perfect but usable location in Kreuzberg
  
• Getting a team: If you are working with a "Nobudget", getting reliable people is always difficult. Someone I know advised me: If you do not pay people, they don't feel an obligation to the commitment and it will end up costing you more than paying for efficient professionals. He was kind of right. Because I do have pictures now, but I still need photos, as a lot of the 260 (!!) pics were unusable.
  Out of 12 people that had agreed to work with me, 3 pulled out with plenty of warning but, 6 cancelled last minute (within 24h prior to the shooting). Some with valid reasons such as sickness but some just mixed up the dates.
  
• Taking pictures: Because I had difficutlies finding a photographer at first I had bought myself an old system camera from Sony. I had read a lot about fashion fotography online and from what they were saying, an old camera would be sufficient as long as I was not trying to shoot images for billboard advertising (which I was not). Unfortunatelly, the combination of camera and objective lenses were less than ideal. Mixing that with someone (me) who does not have an eye for fotography and a gloomy room, you can imaging the outcome
  
• Photoshoping for your life: No matter how good your photoshop skills are, some things just cannot be saved. Well, I suppose if you are REALLY good, you could do something about my pictures. But I am NOT that good. I cannot change the facial expressions of the models, remove the blur of the picures without having it to pixeled and I cannot change a bodyform completely.
  

Now here are some of the images, some photoshoped, some left as they are.

With these pictures I am now working on a flyer to distribute in organic shops. I also am looking into various means online  marketing. I have started on pinterest, have to be more active on facebook and instagram and then there is google ads... We will see how that works...

But here the link to pinterest, if you want to pins some :) https://www.pinterest.de/keleven9653/organic-fashion-k-eleven/