Amazon is opening a New York photo studio for fashion

Amazon.com knows that to sell high fashion through the Web, it can’t depend on attentive salespeople, plushy boutiques or free-flowing glasses of champagne to loosen wallets. Online, it’s all about the photos.

So the online retail giant, which has bet heavily on being the go-to destination for $1,000 dresses as well as bargain books and DVDs, said it has rented a 40,000-square-foot New York City studio to snap photos of its fashion apparel and accessories, Women’s Wear Daily reports.

Cathy Beaudoin, president of Amazon Fashion, told WWD that New York was a natural choice as a global fashion capital.

“It felt like a pretty natural evolution for us as we build our fashion business, to anchor it to key outposts where we have access to top talent,” Beaudoin said.

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The new studio, located in Brooklyn, is one out of six locations operated by Amazon but the first solely dedicated to fashion. Its goal is to centralize the work flow for product photos, Beaudoin said.

“We will have centralized our operations in such a way that we can share best practices across brands, share talent and develop really tight relationship with models and photographers,” she said.

The Brooklyn location will create product photos for Amazon Fashion, its flash sale site MyHabit and Shopbop, an online upscale fashion retailer Amazon acquired in 2006.

The investment comes as Amazon is also spending millions to build warehouses around the country to ensure fast delivery to customers. A “fulfillment center” in San Bernardino, the first of two planned for California, opened last month.

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