Chess hasn't changed much visually in decades. Handcrafted wooden sets are beautiful but expensive and inaccessible. Standard club sets are functional but forgettable — cheap-feeling, poorly designed, the kind of object you use but don't notice.

Nymzo was founded in New York in 2025 to close that gap. The idea was simple: apply contemporary design principles to chess gear so that the products actually match the culture around the game today. The result is a tightly edited line: Rollup Flexmat boards, the Stanton Series chess set, and accessories. All built to be used, carried, and noticed.

When a brand launches with that kind of positioning, the product imagery has to back it up.

The Scope

Squareshot handled five projects for Nymzo beginning in December 2024, covering the brand's accessories and board catalog: the logo hat, the Flexmat rollup chessboard in multiple colorways, and the carry tote bag.

Squareshot also produced photography of the chess pieces and a carrying bag. Those images are not the ones currently used on Nymzo's PDPs; the live PDP images were shot by a different provider, but they represent the approach Squareshot brought to the full product line, and are included here as portfolio reference.

The Challenge

On-white photography is often treated as the default — neutral, uncomplicated, easy. For Nymzo, it was a considered choice. As cofounder Elliott Walker explains:

"Nymzo is a design-forward brand. We put so much time and energy into the product design, ensuring every detail is just right. On the website, we wanted the products to speak for themselves. Clean, strong photography and lighting allow the design to do all of the work."

The products are the brand. There's no lifestyle narrative to lean on, no context to fill the frame. The objects have to carry the image entirely.

That raises the bar on execution across every product category. The Flexmat boards have texture and dimension that flat lighting flattens. Colorway consistency matters more here than in most categories — a buyer choosing between colorways is making a design decision, and the photography has to give them an honest, accurate basis for it.

Chess pieces add their own layer: small objects with a matte finish whose silhouettes need to read clearly, whether you're isolating a single piece or shooting a full set arranged with a bag. The tote and hat needed to sit alongside the game pieces as part of a unified brand world, not as category-separated afterthoughts.

Across five separate project batches, all of it has to stay consistent. A catalog that looks like it came from different shoots is a catalog that looks unfinished.

The Work

For the Flexmat boards, lighting was calibrated to retain the material's visible texture — the rollup format is a feature, not just a convenience, and the photography reflects that. Color accuracy across colorways was held consistent throughout, so the range reads as a collection rather than a set of standalone variants.

Accessories were treated at the same standard as the hero products. The tote and the logo hat are part of the brand identity, and the photography positions them that way.

The chess piece and carrying bag photography, produced by Squareshot and shown here as a portfolio reference, applies the same approach to the most technically demanding part of the line. Small objects. Multiple colorways. Material finishes that respond differently to the same light. Individual shots and grouped arrangements. The brief was the same as everything else: let the object speak.

The Result

The photography delivered on what Nymzo's customers actually need. Walker notes that buyers frequently return to the product pages multiple times before purchasing:

"It is not unusual for a customer to return 6-7 times to the product page to look at the photos, check design specs, and read reviews."

The images have to hold up to that level of scrutiny.

"Having crisp, rich photography really helps bring the products to life," he says, pointing to the volume of pre-purchase questions the brand receives about texture, weight, and material feel.

Walker describes a customer behavior that reflects exactly what strong PDP imagery is supposed to do:

"The visual impact of the brand and photography often grabs attention and brings customers in, but many then spend time assessing the product in detail before making an investment."

Nymzo currently sees conversion rates between 1-2% — consistent with a premium price point where the buyer journey is longer by design.

The Squareshot-produced imagery for Nymzo demonstrates what on-white photography looks like when it's executed to the standard a design-first brand actually requires. Consistent across product categories, accurate across colorways, and calibrated to the material qualities that make these products worth buying.

For a brand that launched in 2025 with a direct challenge to the aesthetics of an industry that hasn't updated in decades, that visual standard matters. Every image in this case study is evidence that the care Nymzo applies to their products, Squareshot applied to how those products are shown.