annabelle breakey’s urban metallics for method
Method teams up with a leading designer every year to create a limited edition collection featured in Target. Brooklyn-based interior designer Athena Calderone came up with this year’s collection called Urban Metallics. The collection, made up of four fragrances and seven metallic colors, has been well received, even earning accolades from Real Simple magazine.
“Just when you thought all things gold and rose gold ran their course, the fashionable colors strike again,” wrote Tamara Kraus. “The scents not only smell great, but they are also pet-friendly and planet-friendly, thanks to their recyclable bottles made with 100-percent recycled plastic. And of course, that means they’re people-friendly, too, with a naturally derived formula that leaves hands ultra-soft and clean.”
The images were created by Annabelle Breakey. While Annabelle has shot several campaigns for Method, this one was particularly challenging because not all of the high-shine metallic soaps had been manufactured at the time of the shoot. Instead, she photographed naked bottles and added the colors and graphics in post-production.
“We had some of the colors, so we photographed the ones we had so that we’d know where the highlights and shadows would look like,” shared Annabelle. The fragrances, cool lavender, burnished cedar, copper rain, and golden citrus, come in a combination of polished nickel, pewter, brass, rose gold, and copper colors.
“Emily, my in-house superstar retoucher, put the image we shot together with the missing colors and the bottle graphic, which comes from an Illustrator file created by Method.”
Annabelle said it’s actually fairly common for a client to schedule a photo shoot before the product is ready for market because a certain amount of lead time is required to develop the content for the numerous marketing channels that will be utilized—print, video, billboards, social. Other times, a computer-generated image is higher quality and more appropriate for large-scale advertising.
“Sometimes when you photograph the actual printed piece you can find on the shelf, there’s a dot pattern to it, and when you run it through the printing press again you get a moiré, which doesn’t look very good when you blow it up really big. Often what we’ll do is take the art off the package, photograph it, and add the package art from the Illustrator file to make it really pretty and clean. You can blow it up as big as you want and it still looks amazing,” she explained.
Look for Method’s Urban Metallics Limited Edition Collection at Target and Walgreens through summer 2018.