corporate2024London

Kasalin , Founder Headshots

The founder of a sunglasses brand can't look like a stock photo executive. These portraits had to carry both fashion credibility and business authority.

Client

Kasalin

Role

Photography

Location

London

Year

2024

4 photos

Case Study

Kasalin is a sunglasses brand built on design taste and founder personality. When your product lives on people's faces, the person behind the brand matters , and so does how they look in every investor deck, press feature, and Instagram bio. The founder needed portraits that did two things at once: signal fashion credibility to buyers and retail partners while holding up in the corporate contexts where funding conversations happen.

The Brief

Deliver a series of founder headshots that work across both fashion and corporate channels. The portraits must feel at home on a brand lookbook page and a LinkedIn profile alike , polished enough for investor presentations, distinctive enough for a fashion brand's 'About' page. Four final images covering different tonal registers, from approachable to authoritative, all unmistakably the same visual identity.

The Challenge

Fashion founder portraits occupy a narrow register. Too corporate and the brand loses its edge. Too editorial and the founder looks like a model rather than a business leader. Every frame had to sit precisely in that gap.
A sunglasses brand's visual identity is inherently about faces. The founder's portrait becomes an extension of the product language , same attention to form, light, and surface.
Four images must cover distinct use cases: website hero, social avatar, press kit, investor deck. Each demands a different tonal register without breaking the visual thread that ties them together.
The founder needed to look like someone who designs beautiful objects, not someone posing for a company directory. Direction had to draw out personality without tipping into performance.
Lighting had to be fashion-grade , sculpted, dimensional, intentional , while still producing images that crop cleanly for the utilitarian formats corporate channels demand.
With no product shown in frame, the portraits had to implicitly communicate what Kasalin does through styling, mood, and the visual sophistication of the photography itself.

The Approach

Opened with a conversation about where each portrait would actually live , website, press, social, pitch materials , so the session was structured around real destinations rather than generic coverage.
Designed a lighting setup that borrows from fashion editorial rather than corporate headshot convention: directional, sculpted, with enough contrast to give the images personality without making them unusable in conservative contexts.
Directed four distinct registers across the session , confident and direct for press, warm and approachable for social, composed and authoritative for investor materials, and one looser frame for brand storytelling.
Kept styling minimal and intentional. The founder's own aesthetic became the guide , no wardrobe changes that would fragment the visual identity, just subtle shifts in expression and angle.
Shot with generous negative space and crop-safe framing throughout, ensuring every image survives the full spectrum of aspect ratios from square social tiles to wide website banners.
Graded the final set to align with Kasalin's brand palette , clean, modern, with a warmth that nods to the tactile quality of well-designed eyewear.

The Execution

The session ran as a focused, four-look portrait shoot , not four outfits, but four intentions. Each frame was directed toward a specific channel and a specific register of the founder's presence. Lighting stayed fashion-forward throughout: a key light shaped to sculpt cheekbones and jawline, fill kept low enough to preserve dimension, and a careful edge separation that gives every image the kind of depth you expect from eyewear campaigns. Direction was conversational , no rigid posing, just guided micro-adjustments that let the founder's personality land naturally. The final four images were graded as a set, with enough tonal consistency to function as a cohesive portrait identity while allowing each frame to stand alone in its intended context.

The Outcome

Kasalin's founder now has a portrait toolkit that operates across every professional touchpoint without compromise. The same visual authority that reads as fashion credibility on the brand's website also holds its weight in investor decks and press features. The four-image set eliminated the common startup problem of using one overworked headshot everywhere , each context now gets the appropriate register of the founder's presence, drawn from the same session and the same visual language. The portraits also established a photographic standard that informs how the Kasalin brand photographs people going forward.