With 4,000 SKUs and growing, Minted, the premium online marketplace of design goods created by independent artists and designers, faced a colossal web-design challenge: how to deliver many thousands of personalized images on the fly.
Minted showcases and sells exceptional art from around the world through its single platform and marketplace. Daily the company receives thousands more images to manage and deliver from the network of contributing artists. Minted was struggling to optimize its website to scale with its growing inventory of global art.
As the number and size of images grew, Minted began to experience slower page loading speeds. The slow-loading pages were hurting retention and negatively impacting SEO rankings. The Minted team was looking for a technology partner that could compress images at scale without losing resolution, quality, or fidelity.
In a recent discussion titled Picture Perfect: How Minted Delivers Personalized Visual Content at Scale at this year’s CommerceNext – Ecommerce Growth Summit, Minted’s VP of Marketing, Suruchi Shukla, and Cloudinary’s VP of Product Marketing, Milind Pansare spoke about how to incorporate generative AI to further enhance content personalization.
“As a marketer, the two things that I’m thinking about,” said Shukla, “is how do I use AI to cut cost and find that efficiency because when we have this many products… and more new products come in… and do it at scale because again they now have to live on across our PDPs. This was one of the problem statements we took to Cloudinary and they built this functionality specifically for Minted and it’s actually made a huge difference in how a consumer sees [a piece of art] in real life.”
Later in the conversation, Shukla and Pansare cover how AI can instantaneously support subject recognition, content-aware cropping, and alt-text generation for natural language similarity searches.
The benefits didn’t end there. Further leveraging AI and ML within the Content Velocity solution, Minted reduced file sizes by up to 50% while maintaining visual fidelity and improving core web vitals (CWVs). Other capabilities include:
- Enhancing automatic formatting and quality selection.
- Auto-delivering assets in optimal size.
- Dynamically creating SEO-friendly URLs.
- Optimizing multi-CDN delivery.
When Minted introduced the Direct-From-Artist marketplace in 2022, the storefront further expanded its community to encompass makers who work in mediums like ceramics, glass, wood, and metal, adding new disciplines, expertise, and fresh inspiration to the platform.
Shukla explains, “Marketplace means we now are open to about 800 sellers that are selling on the site. As they upload their images they’re uploading images based on their brand look and feel and tone. That does not necessarily match Minted and we are, you know, we’re a little bit more obsessed about our brand, so how do we start to uplevel these images and make them look and feel similar to the Minted brand.”
To scale its marketplace efficiently and effectively without manually programming the product page for each new piece of art in the catalog, Minted has relied on Cloudinary to create image and video automation on-the-fly.
Minted can now offer visual experiences like 3D viewings, 360° spin sets, and videos that highlight the details shoppers need to know before they purchase art for their favorite spaces. These assets can be automatically added to a customizable product gallery that includes distortion effects and texture mapping.
These features greatly improve conversions and reduce returns because shoppers have a realistic understanding of the piece – a challenge that has traditionally inhibited e-commerce sales for art and specialty items.
Are you interested in learning more about how your business can benefit from these capabilities and the ongoing integration of generative AI? You can listen to Suruchi Shukla and Milind Pansare’s full presentation, read our case study with Minted, or reach out to us today for a 1:1 discussion.
