The UGC Lookbook Playbook: from customer photos to a WhatsApp drop

Chapter previews

1. Chapter 01

   Choosing rights-cleared content

   A lookbook is a public surface, so the first filter is not "which photos are prettiest" but "which photos can we show". Start from a collection whose posts carry a current rights grant with a source and an expiry date. Count undated grants as uncleared; an expiry you cannot name is one you cannot defend. Then pick for the phone: vertical framing, a face or a hand in shot, the product doing something rather than sitting on a shelf. Twelve to twenty pages is plenty. Idukki's Generate lookbook builds one page per approved post from any collection, with the creator credit and the tagged products attached, so the editing job is deciding what to drop rather than what to add.

2. Chapter 02

   Sequencing a story

   A tap-through story has an order, and the order does the selling. Open with a page that carries a feeling and no price: the coat moving, the bag in daylight. Put the strongest customer clips in the middle, where the reader is deciding whether this is for them. Keep the specification and the reviews after the feeling, so they confirm a want rather than trying to create one. Close on the offer, with the date visible. Publitas's catalogue benchmark puts about ten seconds on a page, which is the budget per scene: one idea, one product pin, and nothing that needs a caption to explain it. If a page needs longer, it needs cutting.

3. Chapter 03

   Pricing and offers

   Every product on a page carries the price from your catalogue at the time you tag it, and checkout always charges the store price, so keep the two aligned before a drop, even a week after the link was sent. The offer is a discount code with a valid-until date. Two rules make it work. The code is visible on the page, one tap to copy, rather than hidden behind a form. And it stops rendering the moment the date passes, so a late forward shows the lookbook and the live prices but not a promise you have withdrawn. Offer copies are a metric in their own right: set them against orders and you learn whether the urgency did anything, which is the number to compare between drops.

4. Chapter 04

   The WhatsApp share

   The WhatsApp Business app sends a broadcast to at most 256 saved contacts. A forwardable link has no such limit, and the design job is making it worth forwarding. The preview card is the first test: Meta's spec wants an image under 600 KB, at least 300 px wide, 4:1 or squarer, with the Open Graph tags in the first 300 KB of HTML, and most catalogue pages miss at least one. Idukki generates the card to spec. The Share on WhatsApp button builds a wa.me link with your wording and the lookbook URL, so a forward is one tap. Order on WhatsApp opens a chat with your number and the basket written in. A QR code covers print, packaging and the shop floor.

5. Chapter 05

   Measuring a drop

   Pick three numbers that answer a question. Completion rate says whether the sequence holds; if half the openers leave by page three, fix the order before the offer. Product taps per open says whether the pages are shoppable in practice. Offer copies against orders says whether the urgency worked. Shares are the WhatsApp-specific line: a drop that gets forwarded earned its reach. Split everything by utm_source, one link per channel, so the broadcast list and the forwards read separately. On Shopify, the visitor id follows the shopper to the store and the order webhook attributes the sale back to the lookbook, on the same reconciled line the rest of the dashboard uses. Nobody has a public benchmark for this yet; your second drop is your benchmark.

6. Chapter 06

   A weekly drop cadence

   One good lookbook is a campaign. A weekly one is a channel. The cadence is what makes the library compound: each week's drop pulls the newest rights-cleared posts, which keeps every product's freshest content in front of the people most likely to forward it. A workable week: Monday, pick the collection and generate; Tuesday, sequence and set the offer; Wednesday, test the card in your own chat; Thursday, send to the broadcast list and post the status; the weekend, read completion, taps, copies and shares against last week. Keep the offer window short so the date means something, and retire pages whose product taps stay at zero for two drops running.