Milleporte - J.M. Weston Virtual Store

Milleporte sells luxury brands online in Japan. For J.M. Weston, the French shoemaker, they wanted customers to move through a shop rather than scroll a grid of thumbnails, and to buy without ever leaving it.

The store is photographed, not modelled. We shot the real space in 360 degrees, bracketing exposures and stitching the frames into high dynamic range panoramas, so the leather, the wood and the light are the ones that were actually in the room. Modelling it would have been faster and would have looked like a game.

On top of the photography sits the shop. Products are pulled from Milleporte’s catalogue as the customer walks around, so nothing on a shelf is a stale copy of a price or a stock level, and a pair of shoes can be opened, inspected, added to the cart and taken through checkout without leaving the boutique.