A wholesale lookbook is the picture half of your pitch. It shows a buyer what the range looks like in a shop, what it sits next to, and what kind of customer picks it up. The numbers half — codes, cases, prices, minimums — belongs somewhere else, on a line sheet. Brands that merge the two produce a document that is too pretty to order from and too cluttered to enjoy.
If you are sending one attachment to a boutique, send the line sheet. If you are sending two, the lookbook goes first, because it answers the question a buyer asks before price: would this look right in my shop.
What a lookbook does that a line sheet cannot
A boutique buyer is curating. They are not buying a candle, they are buying the third thing on a shelf that already has two other candles on it, and their real question is whether yours makes the shelf better or just busier.
A line sheet cannot answer that. It is a grid: code, name, case pack, wholesale price, suggested retail. It is built for speed and for reordering, and it is the document a buyer actually places an order from. The structure of one is covered in wholesale line sheet.
A lookbook answers a different question with photographs. It shows scale, because a buyer cannot tell from a white-background shot whether your jar is the size of a shot glass or a soup can. It shows the range together, so the buyer can see that six scents make a display rather than a random assortment. And it shows the context you want to be associated with, which is how a two-person brand signals that it belongs in a shop charging thirty dollars for a candle rather than twelve.
What goes in it
Keep it to eight to sixteen pages. A buyer will give you about ninety seconds on a phone between customers.
A cover with one image and the season. Not a logo on white. One photograph that is honestly the best you have, and the season or year so the buyer knows whether they are looking at current stock.
One page about the brand, maximum. Where it is made, what it is made of, who makes it. Three short paragraphs. The temptation to tell the founding story at length is strong and almost always wrong — a buyer cares about the story because their customer will ask about it at the counter, so give them the version they can repeat in two sentences.
Product pages, grouped the way a shop would display them. Not alphabetically, not by SKU. If four of your six scents are the ones a gift shop would run together in a basket, put those four on a spread. Give each product a name, a one-line description and nothing else. No prices.
Lifestyle images that match your actual retail tier. This is the part brands get wrong in both directions. Over-styled images shot in a house nobody lives in read as stock photography. Under-styled phone snaps on a kitchen counter read as a hobby. The target is somewhere in between: real surfaces, honest light, the product in use.
A closing page with the practical facts. Minimum order value, case pack sizes, lead time, who pays freight, and how to order. Even in a lookbook, put these four numbers on the last page. Buyers screenshot that page.
What to leave out
No prices. The moment prices go in, the document has to be reissued every time anything changes, and you end up sending a stale PDF to a shop that then holds you to last year's number.
No long ingredient lists or certification logos, unless you sell food or skincare where a buyer legally needs them. Those belong in the product detail sheet.
No pages of press mentions. One line on the brand page is plenty.
No testimonials from consumers. A buyer does not care that someone on the internet loved the packaging. What moves a buyer is another shop stocking you and reordering, which is a sentence, not a page.
How to shoot one without a studio
Most brands reading this have a phone, a window and a table. That is enough, and the constraint usually produces better photographs than a rented studio, because it forces consistency.
Shoot everything in one session, in the same light, on the same two or three surfaces. Consistency is what makes a set of images read as a brand rather than a folder. A buyer flicking through sixteen pages notices a change of background instantly and reads it as carelessness.
Shoot each product three ways: alone with room around it, in a group with the rest of the range, and in use or in hand so scale is obvious. The in-hand shot does more work than the other two combined, because it silently answers the size question that otherwise costs you an email.
Shoot for the crop you need. A lookbook page is usually landscape, and a phone shoots portrait, so leave space at the sides of every frame. Nothing ruins a spread faster than a product with its top sliced off.
If the range is genuinely unphotogenic on its own — supplements, cleaning products, anything in a plain bottle — shoot the shelf instead. Six bottles lined up in a row is a display, and a display is what the buyer is imagining anyway.
How do you send it and what format?
Send a PDF, and send it small. A lookbook over about eight megabytes gets stripped by some mail servers and opened by nobody on mobile data. Export at screen resolution, not print, unless a buyer specifically asks for something printable.
Host it somewhere with a stable link as well as attaching it, because buyers forward attachments to a colleague and attachments get lost. A page on your own site that holds the current lookbook, the current line sheet and the wholesale inquiry form means one link does the whole job and always shows the current version.
Name the file properly. "Lookbook.pdf" sits in a buyer's downloads folder forever unfound. Your brand name, the word lookbook and the season is what gets reopened three weeks later when they are placing orders.
Update it twice a year at most. A lookbook that changes monthly is a sign the range is not settled yet, and buyers can feel that.
Does a small brand need a lookbook at all?
Not at the start. If you have three products and no stockists, a good line sheet and four honest photographs in the body of an email will get you your first accounts. Building a sixteen-page document before anyone has ordered is a way of feeling productive without approaching a shop, and it is one of the most common places a wholesale plan stalls. The order of operations is set out in how to start wholesale.
A lookbook starts earning its keep at roughly the point where three things are true. The range is big enough that a buyer has to choose rather than take everything. You are talking to shops that curate on aesthetics rather than on price. And you are pitching more than a handful of stores a month, so the document gets reused rather than rebuilt.
At that point it becomes the thing you attach to a cold email, hand out at a market, and leave behind after a meeting, and the same images feed your wholesale catalog and your retailer emails for the rest of the year.
If you are not yet sure which kinds of shop your range belongs in — and that decision changes every styling choice in the book — paste a product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers that stock similar products. Shooting for gift shops and shooting for design stores produce two different documents, and it is cheaper to know which one you are making before the session than after.
Questions DTC brands ask about wholesale lookbooks
Can the lookbook and line sheet be one document? They can, and for a range under about eight products it is often the right call: photographs on the left page, the ordering grid on the right. Past that size, split them, because the pretty half and the useful half get updated on different schedules.
How many pages is too many? Past about twenty, buyers scroll rather than read. If the range genuinely needs more, split it by category and send the one that fits the shop.
Should it be printed? Only for trade events and meetings, and only in small quantities. Printed books date fast and a buyer is more likely to email you from a PDF than from a page they have to type a URL off.
What if the photography is not good enough yet? Then fix that before anything else, because retail buying is a visual trade and weak images will sink an otherwise good range. A tighter set of six strong photographs beats sixteen mediocre ones, and examples of how that looks in practice are in line sheet examples.