Dan Soha, founder of Argoz socks, first met Wyoming-based portrait photographer Taylor Glenn several years ago in San Francisco. He’s been following Taylor’s work ever since, and when his collection of argyle socks was ready to hit the market, he knew exactly who to call for the product photography.
After hearing Dan’s proposal, Taylor was excited to work with Argoz and highlight their playful socks. Since Taylor was working with Argoz directly, he got to be part of the brains behind the shoot—helping to pitch shoot ideas and concepts. Taylor really enjoyed being a part of the deliberations.
It was probably one of the most fun brainstorming sessions around a product I’ve ever done. Dan came to me with all kinds of fun ideas and it evolved from there. The idea of Argoz is to give attention to a garment that’s usually an afterthought. The team really wanted to create an image of hip, fun, artsy, alternative culture with a fashion forward sensibility. One of the coolest ideas they established was that you can mismatch different socks based on color. Each patten has an opposite pair available with the diamond pattern reversed. They call it “Rocking the Stevens” after some friend of Dan who’s apparently an interesting character.
Taylor considered this to be a dream assignment due to the fact he had so much involvement. He was given almost complete creative freedom from the photography standpoint and enjoyed every minute of it. He says, “Dan really loves my work and he’s one of those rare businessmen who know how to let people do what they do well.”
The only real challenge for Dan and Taylor was “pulling back the reins” on their shoot concepts.
If we had an unlimited budget, who knows what we could have done! The reality is that this is a startup so we had to really focus on a solid and realistic shoot within the budget we agreed on.
Even with the reins pulled, the final photographs came out great. Taylor is proud of the whole series and says it’s hard to pick a favorite, “because pulling back and looking at everything is much more gratifying because you can see—I hope—this overall story we created around people having fun in socks.”
Dan and the Argoz team are also very happy with Taylor’s work and are currently using them on their website, for PR and in packaging brochures. Taylor says he learned a lot from the shoot like how important the plan is, and to be flexible.
[I’ve learned to] keep an open mind and be receptive to the unexpected. There’s nothing better than the surprises that happen in the moment and end up becoming a star of the shoot.”