A product photography studio has a deceptively simple job. Retailers send products, the studio photographs them, and the finished images go back. Do that for thousands of products every season, for retailers with exacting requirements, and keeping track of it all becomes the hardest part of the work.
Before: documents, spreadsheets and email
When the studio came to us, it was tracking everything across shared documents, spreadsheets and email. Which products had arrived? Which had been shot, and by whom? Which images were finished and which still needed work? The answers existed, but they were spread across several places, and they were only as current as the last person who remembered to update them.
Information from the retailers had to be typed in by hand, and every copy was a chance for a mistake to creep in.
One catalogue, shared by everyone
We built a single web-based catalogue of every product in the studio, holding everything managers and photographers need to know about it.
- Products arrive already recorded. The retailers' shipping notes are uploaded straight into the system, which creates the product records from them. Nothing is retyped.
- Everyone knows what's theirs. Products are assigned to people, with email notifications and reminders, so responsibility for each job is clear.
- Big files go where they belong. Photographers upload high-resolution images, hundreds of megabytes at a time, through an integration with the studio's cloud storage, and the system keeps track of which images belong to which product.
- Managers see the real picture. Reports show where every product and every shoot stands, up to the minute, instead of being pieced together at the end of the week.
The question "where's that product?" now has one answer, and anyone can look it up.
Built to the retailer's specification
Large retailers are precise about what they'll accept: sizes, formats, naming and the set of shots each product needs. The system knows those requirements, so images are checked against them before they're submitted, rather than bounced back afterwards. Each seasonal shoot is catalogued, checked and delivered in the form the retailer expects.
Why it worked
The studio didn't need a general-purpose project management tool or a digital asset manager with hundreds of features. It needed something that understood its particular flow of work, from a retailer's shipping note to an approved image, and took the repetitive parts off people's hands.
That's a pattern we see often: a small, focused tool that replaces a tangle of documents and email, and gives a busy team back hours every week. If that sounds like your team, get in touch.