1,500 brands, six winners: inside the first Photoroom 100 awards

The Photoroom 100 Best Product Pages launched in August as an annual benchmark for e‑commerce visual excellence. On 15 September in New York, we named the six best of the list.

Rothy's took PDP of the Year at the inaugural Photoroom 100 gala at The Malin Chelsea. Five category winners were announced alongside it, all drawn from the 100 brands published this summer. Founders and operators from the featured brands were in the room, with marketplace and retail leaders, our judging panel, and Kamil Sattar of The Ecom King, who read out the results.

What the Photoroom 100 is

An annual list of the 100 US e‑commerce brands whose product pages set the standard for how products should look, communicate and sell online.

Finding them took a review of more than 1,500 US brands. Each one was scored out of 30 across six dimensions, drawn from what we'd already established makes a great product detail page, and only brands scoring 27 or higher made the list: visual consistency, product fidelity, image composition and craft, image type coverage, conversion focus and brand distinctiveness.

There was no entry form. Brands were identified and scored first, then reviewed by an independent panel, and selection didn't require a brand to be a Photoroom customer. A benchmark that only recognises your own users is marketing, not a standard.

Jeff Strauss, our Head of Imaging, built the rubric across 37 years at Gap, Amazon and Wolt in 34 countries. Five independent judges then reviewed shortlisted brands in their own specialism:

• Conrad Sanderson, most recently Head of In-House Studio at Hugo Boss, on beauty

• Allison Roberts, creative and art director with 26 years shaping visual content for global e-retailers, on home and furniture

• Adrian Mueller, commercial food and beverage photographer and 16-time Lürzer's Archive 200 Best Ad Photographers selectee, on food and beverage

• Clair Carter-Ginn, Strategic Advisor and Program Director of Rutgers University's Advanced Creative Operations Program, on fashion

• Vicki March, formerly Creative Director at Amazon Fashion, on fashion

One striking hero image gets a brand nowhere here. The rubric scores the whole visual system around a product, and whether it gives a shopper enough to buy with confidence.

The final 100 is 40 brands in fashion and apparel, and 20 each in beauty, home and furniture, and food and beverage.

The six winners

• PDP of the Year: Rothy's, the overall award for an exceptional product detail page experience and the definitive Photoroom 100 honour.

• Best Visual Consistency: Maiden Home, for a visual language that holds across the entire catalogue.

• Best Product Fidelity: Diptyque, for accurate, trust-building representation of colour, texture, material and product detail, the thing shoppers notice last and return fastest over.

• Best Image Composition: Patagonia, for craft and art direction that keep the product at the centre of the image.

• Best Lifestyle Staging: Tecovas, for product visuals placed in real-world context with editorial quality.

• Best Conversion Gallery: Blue Apron, for an image sequence built to answer customer questions and move shoppers towards purchase.

The night in New York

Guests arrived to a carpet and a room built around the list, all 100 product pages running on screens along the walls, category by category. Copies of the printed Photoroom 100 magazine went out through the evening, carrying the full list, the judges' notes and a foreword from our CEO.

Matt Rouif opened. "People buy pictures and receive products. That gap is where trust is won or lost, and the hundred brands we're recognising tonight have closed it. Product visuals are no longer aesthetics. They're infrastructure for anyone selling online."

Jeff Strauss then brought three of the judges on stage to work through what separates a good product page from a great one, using pages from the list as the examples. Kamil Sattar, who runs The Ecom King, followed with his own read on what makes a page sell, then announced the winners.

Gwen Rodgers, Photography Director at Rothy's, accepted PDP of the Year. "The product page experience has been such a big part of my career, both as a photographer and an art director, so it was truly a proud moment to be recognised as a leader in PDP excellence," she wrote afterwards. "It was refreshing to hear from Photoroom leaders and engineers that, while they're integrating tools that create efficiencies through automation and AI, they are equally committed to retaining the quality piece: product fidelity, product truth, detail, and craft."

Anyone who wanted their own page assessed could have it scored on the night against the same six dimensions, through the Product Page Rater we built on the Photoroom 100 framework.

Photoroom Connect

The gala closed day one of Photoroom Connect, our first private gathering for marketplace and retail leaders, which ran on 15 and 16 September.

Leaders facing the same problems compared notes, and product demos showed how Photoroom applies to their own catalogues.

Over the two days we got into how better visuals drive engagement, conversion and sales, how to scale AI and keep product fidelity, and where personalisation takes visual commerce next.

Matt opened Connect that morning on the shift from scaling visual production to selling more. Jeff set out our Visual Excellence framework alongside Gwen Rodgers of Rothy's, hours before she collected the award. Fabrice Grinda of FJ Labs took on whether AI is a threat or an opportunity for marketplaces, and product leaders from Vestiaire Collective and Mercari worked through what changes when you measure the impact of better seller photos at scale. Poshmark founder Manish Chandra closed the day with Matt, on where visual commerce goes once the catalogue becomes personal.

"The best speaker lineup I've seen at any of these events," said Rafael Orta, CEO of Capture One. Zineb Loulichki, Senior Product Manager at DoorDash, said it "clearly felt like a curated group of experts".

Several Connect guests came straight from the sessions to the awards, Gwen Rodgers of Rothy’s among them, who called it "an informative and rewarding two days". Connect picked back up the following morning.

What the list showed

Across the four categories, the strongest pages were doing the same job in different accents. Fashion brands showed fit, versatility and the life around a piece. In beauty, the work went into making ingredients, texture and formulation legible. Home brands helped shoppers picture a product in their own space, and food brands found ways to get taste and quality across on a screen.

Then there's who was doing it well. Most of the brands here are scaling businesses with no dedicated studio team, competing for the same shopper attention as enterprise retailers, and their product page discipline often matches or beats brands many times their size.

Consistency turns out to be cheaper than scale.

See the list, and score your own

The Photoroom 100 Best Product Pages hub has a page for every brand on the list, with standout examples and what sets each approach apart. You can download the magazine there too.

To see where your own page stands, the Product Page Rater scores any URL against the same six dimensions the judges used, in under a minute.

And if you've seen a page this year that got it right, nominations for the 2027 Photoroom 100 are open now.