Vestira: Building a Photoreal Virtual Try-On Studio for Women's Accessories
How I designed and built Vestira — a free browser try-on studio where four photoreal models wear 24 mix-and-match pieces of clothing, shoes, bags and makeup — from first pencil wireframe to shipped, searchable product.
- The question
- Online shoppers can't picture how a dress, heel or lipstick looks on a real person. The brief: a free, no-signup try-on studio where visitors style photoreal models instantly.
- Stack & tools
- Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS 4, Zustand, sharp, Prisma, SQLite, next/font (Google Fonts), ESLint, z.ai
- What I found
- Vestira shipped as a complete try-on studio: four consistent models across the skin-tone spectrum, twenty-four mix-and-match pieces, full-body framing with proper headroom, 600% zoom inspection and shareable look links.
The idea came from a familiar frustration. Product pages for dresses and heels all look the same: a ghost-mannequin shot, a flat-lay, a model who is demonstrably not you. I kept wondering why trying something on — the most natural gesture in fashion — was missing from the browser. So I sketched the opposite: a magic mirror. One model stays constant while the clothes change around her, the way a fitting room actually feels.
I began on paper. The first wireframes settled the layout in an afternoon: a slim rail of models on the left, a large mirror in the center, a scrollable rack of products on the right, everything else stripped away. On phones the same stack becomes a single column — model strip, mirror, rack — because thumb reach beats cleverness. Those pencil sketches survived into the shipped product almost unchanged.
The cast came next: four models across the skin-tone spectrum — Aria, Maya, Zara and Nadia — each with a distinct face, hair and presence, so every visitor recognizes herself in one of them. Consistency was the hard part: the same face, hairline and proportions in every photograph, across every outfit and angle. I wrote identity sheets for each model — exact skin tone, hair behaviour, body language — and treated them like production bibles. Framing was equally strict: full head-to-toe, floor visible, clear space above the hair, nothing touching the frame edges.
Then the bugs arrived. Early shots cropped chins and sliced off heels, so I introduced breathing plates — the photo scaled to 92 percent over a softly blurred copy of itself — until headroom came built-in. One model began drifting lighter between outfits; the identity sheets, enforced as hard rules in the pipeline, ended the drift. The zoom stage iterated too: wheel, pinch and double-click to zoom, drag to pan, and a 600 percent ceiling calibrated so lipstick inspection happens at exactly lip level. My favourite detail: applying makeup glides the mirror to the face and stays there while you swap shades.
Under the hood, a disciplined queue keeps the experience calm: one photograph rendered at a time, adaptive cooldowns, and a patient countdown instead of error messages. Every styled look serializes into the URL, so any outfit is a shareable link, and the capture button turns the mirror into a downloadable picture.
Vestira launched free, without signup, indexed end to end. It behaves exactly the way the first pencil sketch promised — and after all the iterations, that is the part I am proudest of.
Gallery
Platforms I've helped build for
Kind words
Don't just take my word for it
Notes from teammates and client stakeholders I've worked alongside.
Had the pleasure of working closely with Sanjiv, and he is an exceptional leader who seamlessly bridges high-level strategy with deep technical execution.
Sanjiv excels in technical problem-solving—when complex, high-stakes engineering or architectural challenges arise, he is the person you want in the room. He approaches problems analytically, quickly getting to the root cause and devising elegant, scalable solutions.
Beyond his technical acumen, Sanjiv is a standout leader in solution delivery and team management. He has a proven ability to align cross-functional teams, streamline processes, and keep project milestones on track without sacrificing quality. His clear communication, structured approach, and genuine investment in supporting team members make him a trusted partner and a pillar on any team.
I highly recommend Sanjiv to any organization looking for a strong technical strategist and reliable leader who consistently delivers results.
Aman Kumar Sinha(LinkedIn profile, opens in a new tab)
Senior Product Manager at Merkle Sokrati · Oct 2026
