Hairberry
Watermelon
Launch
When a haircare brand needed images vibrant enough to match the product.
More than a product shot
Hairberry was launching a shampoo and conditioner line built around watermelon extract — a product designed to feel refreshing, hydrating, and modern. They had a strong formulation and a clear brand identity. What they needed were visuals strong enough to carry the concept.
The images had to work across multiple touchpoints simultaneously: Shopify product pages, social media content, and broader launch campaigns. Each frame needed to feel premium without losing the playful, vibrant energy the brand was built around.
The brief wasn't to document the product. It was to communicate a feeling — the sensory experience of something fresh, natural, and effective. That's a different kind of brief, and it shapes everything from how you set up the shoot to how you light the bottle.
Watermelon as the visual language
Rather than shooting the products against a clean background, we built the entire visual direction around the key ingredient. Watermelon — slices, cubes, and textures — was integrated directly into every composition to immediately communicate what the product is about.
Water surfaces introduced the idea of hydration and cleansing. Foam styling in selected scenes hinted at the shampoo's function without being heavy-handed. The colour palette was kept tight: soft pinks, vibrant reds, clean greens — playful but polished, the way modern beauty brands need to look.
Every setup was designed to serve multiple uses. What works as a hero shot on Shopify can also be cropped for Instagram Stories or pulled for a campaign banner. Versatility was built into each frame from the start.
What a shoot day actually looks like
The finished images look effortless. The shoot day is anything but. On this project we were working with a pink reflective acrylic surface, live produce, and translucent bottles that needed precise lighting control. Every setup was reviewed on a tethered monitor in real time so adjustments happened on set — not later in post.
The client's marketing team was on set throughout, reviewing frames alongside us and making decisions about composition and styling as the shoot progressed. That kind of collaborative process is how we avoid revision rounds after delivery.
What made this technically demanding
Every shoot has its constraints. Here's what required the most attention on set — and how we handled it.
Translucent bottles
Clear packaging is one of the harder subjects in product photography. Too much light and the bottle loses its form. Too little and the product colour disappears. We used a softbox at a precise angle with targeted fill to keep the pink liquid visible while maintaining clean bottle edges throughout.
Live water on set
Shooting on a shallow water surface gives you natural ripple reflections — but they shift constantly. Each frame had to be captured within a narrow window of calm. We built 10–15 minute reset windows into the schedule to let the surface settle between setups, which required careful time planning across the day.
Working with fresh produce
Watermelon bruises fast under studio lights. Juice runs, surfaces oxidise, and cut edges look dull within 20–30 minutes. We pre-cut multiple sets and rotated them throughout the shoot to keep every frame looking freshly prepared. It's the kind of logistics that doesn't show in the final image — but it shows if you skip it.
The transformation
Drag to compare the original studio capture with the final edited image — including colour refinement, water texture enhancement, removal of surface imperfections, and AI-assisted composition adjustments.
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How Hairberry put the images to work
After delivery, the images went live across Hairberry's Shopify store, replacing their previous product visuals. The clean white background variants became their primary listing thumbnails. The lifestyle and ingredient shots were used in product description sections and across their launch content.
The AI-generated variations gave Hairberry additional flexibility — different colour palettes and scene contexts for seasonal content — without needing to come back for another shoot. One production day, multiple content directions.
GradePixel understood the brief straight away. The watermelon concept we had in our heads — they just brought it to life. The images came back exactly as we had envisioned, and we've been using them across our Shopify store and social campaigns since day one of the launch.Marketing Team, Hairberry
*Representative of client feedback received
The complete package
About this project
Beauty and haircare product photography in Singapore requires more than a clean setup. Translucent packaging, liquid products, and ingredient-led branding each introduce technical challenges that need to be solved on set — not patched in post-production.
For Hairberry's watermelon launch, the goal was to create a visual system built for scale. Rather than producing a single hero shot, every image was planned with its eventual use in mind: Shopify thumbnail, Instagram post, campaign banner. This approach reduces the need for reshoots and gives brands a flexible content library from a single production day.
GradePixel provides product photography for beauty, skincare, and haircare brands in Singapore. From concept development to final delivery, each project is built around what the images actually need to achieve.
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