Behind The Scenes: Plastic Fantastic

Life in plastic, it’s fantastic!

Wanna know more about how our epic, magazine-style lookbook for Plastic Fantastic came together? Here’s the behind-the-scenes lowdown, complete with hundreds of toys, one gigantic bow, and ALL of the pink things.

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll know that we have a bit of a thing for magical, pastel-pretty collections, beginning with Unicornia back in 2016. So when we first saw the incredible pieces in this collection, in all their pastel, fun, sparkly glory, we knew we had to come up with something pretty amazing to do them justice.

And then it hit us: what could embody everything pink, shiny and cute more than dolls? And what if those dolls were real, and they had their own magazine about doll life? 

Bam! Plastic Fantastic was born.

We had never attempted to do something this complex for a lookbook before, and we knew we’d have to draw on the talents of just about every department at BMHQ to pull it off. 

First, there was our photo shoot team, consisting of stylist and content producer Eden, art director Palmina, and photographer Phi, who had to make sure we got the perfect shots for our magazine. They were joined by the super talented Ella (@miss.ella.binney) and Abény (@abenynhial), and our fabulous hair and makeup artist Alana (@alanamevissen), who was tasked with creating the big hair and ultra-pink makeup needed to create a real ‘doll’ look.

At first, we were planning to find the perfect dream house to use as our location, but that proved a little difficult to find in Brisbane. So we decided to use a whole lot of sets and props to create our magical world in the BMHQ studio.

Our superstar printing department helped us bring our vision to life by creating custom fabric backdrops out of some of the prints in the collection – plaid, floral and of course, flamingoes!

We needed a huge amount of props for this shoot, and the whole BMHQ staff dug through their closets and pilfered their own homes to bring in what we needed – though our stylist and content producer Eden actually owned quite a lot of the pink, glittery pieces featured in the shoot. It’s quite possible she actually is a real life doll…

The shoot studio wasn’t quite big enough for one of our most epic shots – our giant flatlay made up of what felt like hundreds of individual toys and accessories. So our Warehouse team came to the rescue by clearing out our fabric shed to use instead.

This might look pretty random, but Eden actually placed every one of those items very carefully. Check out this epic timelapse of her in action!

We really drew on the talents of our most creative departments for this shoot as well. Our graphic artists put tiny versions of their prints on fabric for our mini doll outfits, and Loren from our customer experience team hand stitched them together. 

Aisha, our product development team leader, made the fab big pink bow that the whole shoot team was completely obsessed with. 

Of course, the work didn’t end with shoot day – we still had a whole magazine to create! First, Phi had to edit the photos he took – and not only did that mean doing his usual perfecting of the images, he also had to extend backgrounds and add additional props to create full magazine spreads, like this:

Once that was done, it was time to turn everything over to our marketing graphic designers Paul and Bryn for the next stage: actually creating our magazine. They put hours and hours into pulling together the final images, the magazine ‘articles’ written by our copywriter Talina, and their own design magic, to come up with the final product. And you will probably agree with us when we say, the result is nothing short of WOW.

And that was a wrap! This was by far one of the most complicated campaigns we’ve ever put together, but everyone had SO much fun bringing our little Plastic Fantastic world to life. We hope you love it as much as we do!