Matching Creative Production Processes to Today’s E-Commerce Needs

Sam Brace: [00:00:00] Welcome to MX Matters. This is where we talk about things that are ultimately affecting what we call the visual economy. That could be images, videos, workflows attached to delivery, management, and more.

My name is Sam Brace. I am the Director of Customer Education here at Cloudinary, and joining me for this episode, as well as many other episodes by this point, is Maribel, who is our technology partner manager here at Cloudinary. So Maribel, welcome back once again.

Maribel Mullins: Hey. Hey. Thanks for having me, Sam.

Sam Brace: So today we’re gonna be talking about photo studio management. Much of when it comes to producing the images and videos, especially for e-commerce purposes, there’s a lot of time and attention and detail that’s put into every single image and every variant and every angle of that image.

And there’s lots of trends that are happening today, but there’s also a lot of trends that are to better understand how we [00:01:00] got to the point of where we are today when it comes to photo studio management and what it means for e-commerce, particularly visual aspects tied to the e-commerce sides of things.

So joined with us is Daniel Jester. He is the chief evangelist for a company called Creative Force. And of course, Creative Force is a company that does have direct integrations with Cloudinary software as a full disclosure.

But he’s here today to really talk about how people in the e-commerce space, in the digital marketing space, in the web development space, how they can be thinking about creative production processes and how we can be matching those to today’s e-commerce needs. So without further ado, Daniel, thank you for coming to the episode.

Daniel Jester: Sam, Maribel, it’s a pleasure to be on the show and just for your information, I don’t think we talked about this before, but this is my first time appearing on another podcast. So I host a podcast, the e-commerce Content Creation podcast, but this is my first foray as being on the guest side of things.

Sam Brace: [00:02:00] Frankly, I can’t think of a better guest. So it’s one of those things where it’s surprising that this is the first. Hopefully this is the first of many.

Daniel Jester: Yeah, absolutely.

And I’m excited to talk about, Sam, you laid it out perfectly. There’s been some interesting and I’ll just kind of cut to the chase. It’s a really exciting time to work in the studio from a perspective of integrations with partner technologies and what we can do to sort of, not to bury the lead a little bit, but I think usher in sort of the next era of e-comm and really codify a lot of the things that we’ve learned over the last few years.

Sam Brace: Because you do work as a chief evangelist at Creative Force, just to give context of what that means for maybe some of the conversations we’re gonna dive into, give us a little bit of detail about what that means in your role. Also a little bit more about the company, for those who are not fully aware of what they do.

Daniel Jester: Yeah, it’s easier for me to explain what Creative Force does. A little bit harder to explain what exactly a chief evangelist is. So I’ll start with the easy thing. Creative Force makes end-to-end production software for photo studios, for basically [00:03:00] scaled up e-commerce photo studios.

And to give your listeners a little bit of a insight into the landscape, we’ve learned a lot over the last 13, 14 years of producing imagery at scale for e-commerce. And I say that amount of time because I think that this modern age of creative production for e-commerce was really born out of the 2008, 2009 recession. Didn’t really get rolling till a little bit into the 2010s, but the way that we do it today was born there. We, of course, have been producing images in order to sell people things for hundreds of years, way back to product illustrators and then up through traditional photography once photography sort of took over from illustration.

And then a couple of things happened. 2005, we really started to see widespread adoption of digital workflows. There were a lot of people that are still in the industry today that basically created the best practices for what a digital workflow in commercial photography looks like. But the recession really changed companies’ minds about how seriously they needed to take [00:04:00] e-comm.

Of course, e-comm had been around, but there were some companies that maybe were holding out or weren’t as committed to it. But with that recession, they saw the need to diversify their offering away from brick and mortar and into other spaces, this new e-comm channel. And with that, that literally requires images.

All of the tricks of how we convince people to buy things in a brick and mortar store don’t really work on a website, and it really comes down to great photos of products. But you also have other needs. You also have aspirational needs for your photography. So we kind of break it down a little bit between product photography workflows, meaning I’m taking pictures of this product.

It’s in a prescribed way, it’s on a white background, or whatever the background color is. Don’t get hung up on that part, but you know what we’re talking about. When you go shopping online, you click into that handbag. There’s a selection of images for you to understand what it is. That’s the product photography or catalog photography, sometimes here it’s called. And then there’s editorial campaign, the stuff that is like lifestyle, like aspirational, show these [00:05:00] people wearing this thing, doing this cool thing. You’re gonna feel like this if you buy this Patagonia jacket from us. Which is true. It does, you wear it. You feel exactly like all of those people doing those things in those pictures. That’s a separate side. But then the other thing that we’re seeing that sort of falls under the editorial side is like, I don’t know anybody who thought that social media was gonna go from like one marketing channel to 150 micro marketing channels, but now all of them require their own content.

And we do have to expand our definition a little bit. You know, Creative Force creates software that powers these studios that make images. Creative Force also handles video, product videos and all of this other stuff, but also, we have an eye towards the future of what some of this stuff is, like short form video for things like TikTok needs to be produced at scale for a lot of these brands. There are some companies and brands that are scaling up and only selling through some of these social channels, and those workflows look quite a bit different too.

So I’ve digressed quite a bit away from Creative Force, and I apologize to your [00:06:00] listeners for that, but Creative Force historically, and the reason it’s such an exciting time to be in the studio is because we are now maturing into what this, if we were sort of born out of the 2008, 2009 recession, we’re kind of like exiting adolescence and becoming young adults here.

That’s evidenced by the fact that there are now software tools that support some of these things because the studios of the past were a pretty scary place. They were a pretty wild place for trying to get work done.

Oftentimes you had product information that lived in a PIM. You had some adoption of some like formalized systems for your merchandising teams to build their assortments and their collections out of, and then you’d load that in with product information and then you would send a spreadsheet to the studio and they would print it up and the photographers would take that spreadsheet and grab a product off the rack and read the tag and try to find the thing on the spreadsheet that it was, and then manually type in the file name that they needed, produce that image, take that file, put it in the right folder. And we almost [00:07:00] always got it wrong. We almost always forgot to name the files the way that they needed to be named. We missed images. And so we started layering on these other tools. Okay. What if we emailed you the spreadsheet and you could copy and paste the file names?

Well, that’s a start. What if we integrated it in with the barcode system so you could scan the barcode and that gave you the file name? Okay, that’s good. Also, like as long as I don’t forget to scan the barcode and all of that, and what do we do about these images? Well, what if we put ’em in a hot folder and then someone writes a script to move those images where they need to go.

Cool. He wrote the script, but then that guy went to another company and nobody knows how that script works anymore. And this is gonna sound familiar I think to your listeners in a lot of other industries, because the adjacent industries, the product and merchandising teams and the e-comm and the web teams that work with the images and work with DAM systems, they’re a little bit older than the studio, right?

They’ve got these tools and technologies that have been around for a while and now have become best practices. We are just learning what the tools and best practices are gonna be for managing it. And we think at Creative Force that we have one of the better tools for this [00:08:00] process. File handling is a non-issue.

Naming is a non-issue. All the information that photographers and retouchers need in order to do their parts of the job is handed to them in the moment that they need it, it’s contextualized. So like, what am I supposed to shoot for this boot? A front, a back, a side, a sole shot. Are all the shots there?

Cuz if they’re not all there, you can’t move on in the process. Good. Images go to the retouchers. They have all the instructions they need to do those things. And then we deliver those assets directly to whatever DAM system our customers use. In a lot of cases, it’s Cloudinary. So the really cool thing about this though, the really exciting thing about this is all of what Creative Force does is powered by product data itself.

And so the product data comes from this PIM system or it doesn’t even have to come from the PIM system. We have plenty of customers, they’ll output a CSV file of all the product in their system, and then we point to that like it’s a database and we pull that product information into Creative Force.

All of this stuff is what? How you build the smart workflows, how you make sure all of the shots are there, how you know how they [00:09:00] need to be named. And throughout the process, we’re continuing to append more and more metadata to those images. Who is the model that’s in this image? What is the product that’s in this image?

All of that stuff. When Creative Force delivers those images and videos and other assets to Cloudinary, they’re already appended with as much metadata as we could possibly pack them full of. These are assets that I call sort of self-aware. They know what’s in the image, who’s in the image, when it can be used and where it can be used.

That’s the crux of why I think it’s a really exciting time to be in the studio because we’re going to be able to unlock a lot of things process-wise internally, but also adoption of future technologies for whatever the next era of e-comm is going to look like. Because users of Creative Force who use a DAM like Cloudinary are getting fully self-aware assets delivered to their DAM system without having to bring in somebody to like go through and append all this metadata, look up all this stuff.

We’re doing it as we go. It’s powering the [00:10:00] workflows in the studio. The studios are working more efficiently, the web teams are working more efficiently, and now we’re able to adapt quickly and with agility to whatever the next phase of technology is going to look like.

Sam Brace: Woo.

Daniel Jester: Lot of talking there.

Sam Brace: But tons of great information inside of it.

I think one thing that you were talking a lot about, it’s an interesting thing for people to be thinking about because there was a period where photo studio management was done prior to the internet, right? And then absolutely the internet comes about, e-commerce starts to evolve.

And as you’re saying, the evolution stage, like there was like a big, big bang type of situation in 2008, 2009 around the recession. But I’d like to unpackage that a little bit because what I could see potentially happening, let me know if my hunch is right in this, is that if you have a brand that was there pre big bang for e-commerce, like let’s think about big box stores, big retailers that are inside of malls, like a Macy’s would be a good example I would think of. Like they’ve been [00:11:00] around since I can imagine. There’s never been a world where there’s never been a Macy’s in my mind.

But then you think about new amazing brands that have come out over the past since the e-commerce boom that you’re describing, like an Allbirds I would think of that has amazing shoes, amazing e-commerce presence.

Do they approach some of these flows differently? Have you ever seen these cases where they rely on maybe older techniques? Or because they don’t know of older techniques that they might be missing some details when it comes to this overall studio management workflows or some of the things that are tied to it?

Daniel Jester: Absolutely. I think some of the legacy brands that you’re describing, like Macy’s, and the one I’ll use as an example because I have direct experience working for them is Nordstrom. Like this is a company that’s been around for a hundred plus years, and has always been a well regarded brand with tons of social capital.

They took I think a really unique approach to making this shift because one of the functional challenges of some of these legacy brands of adopting more modern technology [00:12:00] and frankly just adopting more modern ways of working, realizing that they need to have this e-comm presence and then trying to like figure out… how do we do this?

Some of that is technological, some of that is systems that are so integrated. And a perfect example of this is simply that I worked in the studio for Nordstrom that they acquired as a result of them buying HauteLook.com. Some of your listeners might remember HauteLook.com. It was a flash sale site in sort of the heyday of flash sales.

I don’t think HauteLook is operational anymore. I think they’ve repackaged HauteLook as Nordstrom Rack.com and it’s now like persistent items. But really what Nordstrom did there was they bought a really scrappy startup that had a studio that really closely resembled the way that many studios that grew up with solely an e-com presence.

And they learned from those things. So they acquired this company, they said, oh, your studio looks a lot different than our studio. You’re much more agile, you’re much faster. Which was a big compliment at the time, cuz remember we were like looking up manually on printed spreadsheets and typing in [00:13:00] file names. It was pretty rough.

There’s that side of it where a company can acquire another company and learn some things, but then there’s a technological problem there. And the problem was that we couldn’t adopt any kind of real workflow solution for our studio because for something as simple as at the time, our barcodes didn’t talk to each other.

So scanning a barcode, a SKU barcode for Nordstrom product or any other product that we received, our system had no idea what it was. It did nothing for us. And so we had to find lots of bandaids and things to make that work. But at the end of the day, Nordstrom decided that what we bought in terms of HauteLook and the studio that we acquired is the model by which we need to build off of.

So they knew that there was work to do, but we need to build off of that. For other companies like Macy’s, I don’t have direct experience working at some of these companies, but you’ve seen them. Everybody who works in this industry has watched some of these brands and then all of a sudden Macy’s will have a moment. And they’ve had a few moments recently where you’re like, oh wow. Interesting. Like they’ve figured out a really great way to integrate their e-comm efforts with the rest of their company. And I think at the end of the day, [00:14:00] it’s about letting go of some of that legacy technology. Because the truth is that integrated SaaS systems are the way of the future for a lot of these companies.

Like the days of buying an off the shelf software system that you host on your local server or whatever, and I am not an IT person, so everybody who’s listening, screaming at their headphones that I’ve misrepresented this… fair. Okay. But the days of buying like a DAM system that lives on your server that you administer, that never needs to be updated, that you just bought the feature set that you bought, and that’s it, those really frankly, are gone.

I believe especially from the studio that any company, legacy company, or a company that was born of the e-commerce era has to understand that SaaS systems that are being administered by people who care about that product and providing the support that it needs to continue to grow feature sets are the way forward.

Technology that integrates with adjacent technologies and those integrations have to enhance each other. And that’s [00:15:00] kind of like the relationship between Creative Force and something like, you know, a DAM like Cloudinary, which is that it’s not enough for us to just feed those images in, but we want Cloudinary to be able to take advantage of the things that Creative Force can do in terms of like collecting and appending metadata and providing those types of assets.

So, really, the legacy companies, there has to be somebody bold enough at some level, and you see them learning this. I think Nordstrom learned it early on. Macy’s was a little bit later. I still feel like I’m kind of waiting for JCPenney to have this moment because I know JCPenney has a huge studio in Dallas and I know that they’ve been producing images for a long time, but we’re still waiting on that one to see what’s gonna happen.

But really it’s about adopting this idea that your technology needs to speak to each other. You need to let the professionals produce this technology and support it. Because every studio I’ve ever worked in that’s had a home brew solution or some other legacy solution, future support becomes a problem.

And then you can’t get support for it. Even at Amazon, working at Amazon, we had home-built systems that the studio used that they [00:16:00] chose to no longer support after they were deployed. They were not gonna dedicate any more programmer resources to this thing. When you work with a system, a proven SaaS system, you’re not just buying that technology.

You’re buying almost every future iteration of that technology. You’re buying a system that is more akin to Lego bricks that can be built and integrated off of each other with other things. And you’re buying millions of dollars of development resources that are dedicated to making that product better.

Maribel Mullins: I noticed you mentioned that you need to be able to do these integrations, but I’m trying to think of all the companies that I’ve worked with, and I don’t feel like they have dedicated headcounts for developers to help in these things. Is this a common struggle, or do you see that the bigger companies dedicate more developer resources to help in these integrations or you’re just hoping to fill that gap with software such as Creative Force?

Daniel Jester: I think the idea is to reduce the lift of your own development resources. Every organization I think needs those people in-house. And [00:17:00] the model that we’ve seen with Creative Force that I think works really well, our customers that have, I think, the most success with our tool and with taking advantage of integrations with other tools are the people that just simply have a subject matter expert, somebody who’s taken the time. And in some cases, it’s actually reflected in our title. Many of our European customers will have somebody on staff who their whole job is project manager for Creative Force. And they work for Boohoo. One of our biggest customers in Europe, Boohoo Group, they work for companies like that, but their job is staying in tune with our product, understanding what updates have occurred and what things are coming and how they’re gonna be able to use them. A lot of times they also function as a train the trainer kind of thing. For a software like Creative Force, that’s really important because our software touches a lot of things and it covers and alleviates a lot of complexity in the studio.

And as a result of that, you really have to have somebody who knows Creative Force really well inside and out. And we provide a lot of support for that. But for us it’s really about two things. Providing as [00:18:00] much support for our customers as we can give them reasonably, you know, we’re still a company.

We still have to operate like a company. We have to make a profit and have like reasonable headcount and that kind of thing. But we want to give as much support to our customers as possible. And we also want to make it as easy as possible for their development resources to plug in with us.

And so, just to give you a specific example of this, you don’t have to have a PIM system or be able to integrate with a PIM system to take advantage of Creative Force on like day one of implementation. All we need is a list of products somewhere. So even if that gets copied and pasted into a Google sheet and then sent off to somebody, we want you to be able to integrate with Creative Force as low tech as possible and work your way up to integrations that start to do some really cool things. But for us, it’s always about adding value. Like we’re not building a tool that’s cool just because it’s cool, it needs to solve a problem for a customer.

But we’re very conscious of like, what IT development resources do you have? How can we make it easier for them? And then we often will make recommendations based on that. We onboarded a customer [00:19:00] recently that was really interested in the API integration, but it was gonna take them so long to integrate their product system into our system through the API that we explained to them, listen, you will realize real efficiency gains in the studio today, which is not something that we’ve talked about much on this podcast yet, but all of these things that our software does that help support adjacent systems like PIM and DAM systems are great for the larger organization, but for the studio itself, we also see studios that realize something like 30 and sometimes up to 50% efficiency gains and just how quickly they can work with even the same amount of staff. So we want them to take advantage of that without getting hung up on something like an API integration.

We can integrate with your PIM system today or, or not that we can’t, but it’s gonna take some time. But we want you to realize those efficiency gains as quickly as we can. So let’s get it in, let’s do it the lowest tech way possible, and then let’s work up to the integrations that really work and let’s work at the pace that your developers or your IT team need to be able to work.

Sam Brace: One of the things that you’re touching upon [00:20:00] with efficiency, I think it sounds like, at least from what I understand, things are moving at a faster pace than they’ve ever moved before when it comes to the world of e-commerce as well as things coming in and out of the studio. Because in the past you would have, I think just the time, maybe a bit of luxury to be able to spend some time with that product and get all the angles, and get all the variance that you need.

Now because of just how fast people are typically learning about the products, the overall flow, because purchasing can happen 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it is where you just have such a volume of this coming in.

Is that the reason for all of these pushes towards more efficiency, more automation, more streamlining into various workflows, or are there other aspects to it other than just the constant in and out of the studio?

Daniel Jester: There’s a couple of things. You’re right on one of them. The other one that’s big for me is a little bit more ideological, which I’ll explain in a moment, but you’re absolutely right. For many of our [00:21:00] Creative Force customers and other brands that could become Creative Force customers, really the name of the game becomes speed to web.

Even for more traditional, and I should clarify the way that we think about customers, there’s three core customers for Creative Force, a brand, a retailer, and a commercial studio. So a brand being something like Nike, they’re a brand. They control the product that they sell.

You know, that’s self-explanatory. A retailer often is selling things from other brands, and so they don’t always have the same amount of control over their supply lines. They may not know when they’re getting stuff in. And this is where I lived a lot of my life as a commercial photographer, was on the retailer side.

So Nordstrom obviously is a brand, but also a retailer. Amazon is the big time retailer. And one of our big challenges at Amazon was just like not knowing how much stuff we were gonna get to shoot or when it was gonna show up. And so what that boiled down to was when we did get it, we had an SLA in the studio, a service level agreement to have those images shot and on their way out of the [00:22:00] studio within three days.

And so we needed to have as much of the sort of legwork done around producing an image as possible.

Historically there was a dramatic difference in the way that photography happened. Most of the times, you’re talking about seasonal releases from a brand, and then that imagery would trickle its way down to the retailers.

There may not have been as many retailers who were producing images themselves. They would take these images from the brand and use them for whatever they needed to use them for. In some cases they might shoot them themselves. I mean, think about Amazon in 2006. It was just a different kind of thing than it was today.

What that meant was you had months, you usually had months, you were working on behalf of the brand and you had astronomical budgets and astronomical amounts of time to shoot the stuff. There was shoots that would happen, especially thinking back to like the catalog days where one or two entire days was dedicated to producing a single shot.

The cover shot for that catalog, and those days largely are pretty much gone. The days of that size of budget and having that [00:23:00] amount of time, because as we know, the internet age and in particular, whatever phase of the internet age that we’re in now, things just move so quickly. You don’t always have the luxury of having eight months of time between the time when you’re developing your collection and when you’re going to release it.

Some brands certainly still do, but we’re seeing more and more brands moving away from the traditional sort of fashion seasons. Of course, like the major fashion houses, which they tend to be slower to adopt these things anyway, I think like some of the major fresh fashion brands, thinking about, like Tom Brown, one of my personal favorites, I think launched their first e-comm website in like 2018 or 2019 or something.

We’re not talking about these guys that are slower to adopt to some of this technology. But it’s to the point now where you’re seeing many brands that are doing monthly releases of their product. And so their own product development cycle has gotten a lot shorter.

And in order to support that and maintain relevance, their need to produce assets needs to be a little bit faster. And since 2008, we’ve learned how to shoot these [00:24:00] things really fast to a really high degree of quality. Again, going back to the exciting time for the studio, part of it is that we now have people like myself who grew up in these studios with 10 to 15 years of experience doing this thing exactly. This exact thing, shooting product, getting it through the studio as quickly as possible, learning how to do it fast and to a really high degree of quality, but we’re seeing brands and retailers realizing that these studios that they have, that used to be considered sort of a cost center.

It was a cost of doing business, of having a website that you sold things. We have to shoot this stuff to get it online to sell it. So I’d begrudgingly have to spend all this money to have a studio. There’s some CapEx and there’s some ongoing expenses involved at the studio, payroll and things like that.

In the past, it’s largely been regarded as a cost center, and I’ve seen all sorts of shell games about how they sort of bury the cost of the studio budget into other line items and things like that. It’s all really strange, but what we’re realizing now, what we’re shifting away from, we know how to do this fast.

We know how to do this to a high degree of [00:25:00] quality, and it turns out customers care about aesthetics and the studios and the creative talent that many of these brands and retailers have in a lot of cases in-house are now representing a kind of a strategic advantage to their own ability to sell in the market because everybody’s producing a lot of product and a lot of images.

In some ways it’s a little bit like an arms race. I don’t like to use that analogy too much because it’s a little morbid, but in some ways it’s a little bit of an arms race where you’ve just got people who are moving very quickly, creating new product very quickly, getting it out. And then more importantly, if social media is a huge part of their go-to-market strategy with social media, you need to be able to react in almost real time.

You need to be able to like see what trends are happening and jump on them immediately, because if you even wait a week, you’ve may have missed it. So a lot of these brands are trying to live their marketing life basically in real time, which is a nightmare. And so getting imagery produced, getting it done as quickly as possible, both in line with your product [00:26:00] release schedule, but also to meet the demand of your marketing needs is really the name of the game.

But then also, the CFOs who were pissed that they had to spend a hundred grand to open a new studio are like, well, wait a minute. I spent a hundred grand to open a studio and that might not be a lot of money. I’m spitballing here, guys, don’t hassle me about it. But they’re realizing what they actually did was invested in making a really great creative team that represents truly a strategic advantage.

And there’s no doubt in my mind that it will be these creative teams that usher in whatever the next phase of technology is for e-commerce. I don’t know if it’s gonna be the metaverse. I’ve said this before on my podcast. I’m a little bit skeptical of the value that the Metaverse provides as a concept.

But here’s what I do know. We will absolutely try to sell people things, and it will absolutely be the creative teams that work in these studios today that figure out how to do that, how to create the assets, create the imagery, and create the environments to sell these things to people. It really has become in a lot of ways about speed, and that has to do with just the speed at which technology [00:27:00] moves.

And again, that really speaks to why we need a shift in mentality about the tools that we use to support these things because your tool needs to be as adaptable as everybody else. Like you’re just not gonna be able to adapt to some new outlet somewhere, some new need for marketing imagery as quickly without a system that you can adapt it into very quickly.

Maribel Mullins: So you’re talking about speed and it sounds like everything’s clockwork. But it’s interesting to see that not everyone has figured this out. So from like intake to online, like how fast can we get, instead of having items sit in a warehouse.

What are the variables that you see, or the hiccups that are causing the slowdowns?

Like where can things speed up?

Daniel Jester: Excellent question. A very excellent question. Maribel and I talk a lot about this because it really speaks to a topic that creatives hate, but need to learn how to love, which is the idea of flow production.

If anybody listening to this podcast is familiar with flow production, I don’t think Toyota necessarily invented it, but they definitely perfected it. Henry Ford, I guess really technically invented it. And Toyota has taken it to [00:28:00] an entire new level. But the idea is you break apart these tasks that need to happen. So to run down them really quickly in a photo studio to take a picture of something as simple as a t-shirt, there’s tons of things that need to happen. That t-shirt needs to be packaged up and shipped to the studio. When it arrives at the studio. It needs to be unpacked and it needs to be prepared to be shot because the studio, the t-shirt that’s been packed is wrinkled and it’s creased and it’s not going to look good.

So it needs to be taken out of its packaging. It needs to be steamed most of the time. Standard practice in a studio is to have an assistant with a steamer that’s steaming a rack full of garments. There’s only x number of garments that a steamer can do in a day. That garment then needs to go to whichever set it needs to be shot on first.

A really common workflow for a lot of apparel brands is to shoot something called flat, sometimes it’s called ghost mannequin. The bottom line is it’s that t-shirt isolated by itself. It’s not in a model, it’s just by itself. But then probably that t-shirt also needs to be shot on model.

So it needs to now go to two different [00:29:00] sets. It probably needs to go to a re-toucher because it turns out customers care that the color of a t-shirt is accurate, so that we need to make sure that what we photographed looks like the actual product itself.

So it helps to have the re-toucher have the physical product in front of them. That’s a big thing in Creative Force. This idea of color references where we can capture the accurate color of something and then pass that information through the process, because that’s one of your biggest reasons for returns.

Everybody listening to this podcast and everybody participating in it right now has bought something that arrived that was not the color they expected it to be, and probably resulted in a return.

Scale is another big one. How big is this wallet or handbag? I bought it online, sight unseen except for the photos, and it turns out it’s much smaller, much bigger than I anticipated. Another huge sort of return reason.

But all of these steps, unpacking the product, steaming the product, prepping it to get shot, photography, retouching, all of those things represent a bottleneck. And in flow production, the idea is to eliminate bottlenecks that are unnecessary and then protect and expand bottlenecks [00:30:00] that are necessary as much as possible.

And the way that we do that, expanding those bottlenecks, because all of these bottlenecks are actually super necessary, you need to have people who are dedicated to unpacking the product. They pass it to the next person who steams it, they pass it to the next person who shoots it, they pass it to the next person who does the retouching.

And then in Creative Force, images at that point are just automatically delivered, as opposed to having somebody have to manually do something. The way that we protect the bottlenecks at the retouching and the photography stage is by removing as much unnecessary work from their plate as possible. And so that becomes things like accurate file naming, making sure that you have all of the images because really what represents the things that can derail production of this type is unexpected rework. And this is a concept, I think there’s an entire chapter dedicated to this in the book Scrum. Unexpected rework is a photographer missed an image. It happens all the time. The best photographer that I could ever hire.

And by the way, just a shout out, it’s a guy named Eddie Lee at Huntington Beach, California. Best product photographer I ever hired whenever I [00:31:00] worked in the studio. That guy still misses images, he still misnames images, he’s a human being. So finding technological ways to reduce or eliminate rework is one.

And I think the next sort of phase of this is getting really granular with the things that you take away. So there’s a company out there called Orbit View, which makes these devices, which are designed to automatically shoot a product. They still need a photographer, in some cases an assistant, to operate this device. But we start to have to think about what are value added tasks? That’s a big concept in scrum and flow production. What tasks add value to the end customer and what tasks don’t? And we have to get really granular about the way that we think of these things.

Is there any value to the end customer for a photographer to move a camera because they need to shoot a separate angle? Not really. Is there any value in the customer to move or adjust a light or move the product? Those are things that robots can do. And in the case of Orbit View, they do that. They have a turntable. Like if you’re shooting a shoe, you can set the shoe on [00:32:00] that. If you’re shooting a garment, that works a little bit differently, but then it knows what images you need, the photographer is still there making aesthetic decisions about the shoe or the garment, making lighting decisions about the product that they’re shooting, doing all of the same things that were creative as before, but now they’re not focused on “is my camera in the right position or is the product in the exact right position?” Because those are things that reduce the throughput of that bottleneck. All of those little things of like having to think about file handling, file naming, having to think about am I shooting this to the correct style guide?

All of these things are problems we can solve with technology that is one less thing for that photographer or retoucher or anybody else in the process to have to think about. That is sort of like the intersection of technology and the human element to it, which is how much of the things that are distracting you from where you truly add value, can we automate and remove from your part of the process and then let you just focus on shooting the [00:33:00] highest possible quality image, and then moving on to the next thing.

And so that’s also an element where speed comes into play because then you can start to do things really quickly. There’s less opportunity for you to make a mistake and then having to go back and correct that mistake, and now you’re just shooting great images really fast.

Sam Brace: I think what’s interesting about that is that I completely agree.

I’m sure that everybody that works for Cloudinary also agrees with some of the things you’re saying, like let automation, let robots, let technology help out with some of these more manual tasks for consistency, but also to make sure that it speeds up to your earlier points about efficiency. One of the areas that we’ve seen a lot of that is when it comes to metadata in terms of being able to help create some of that maybe with some AI technology, make sure that we’re able to bring over metadata sets very quickly because that helps with a lot of details for searchability, findability internally, externally.

Have you found that also to be the same when it comes to the creative production workflows?

Daniel Jester: [00:34:00] Yeah, absolutely. And metadata. Truly Creative Force cannot function without the use of metadata. And I’ll give you guys an example, a really specific example of the way that Creative Force works and some of the things that it can provide, the problem solving and the things that it can do to really enhance a customer experience in a lot of ways.

One thing, we can turn any data about the product into metadata that’s appended to an image. And so the minimum that we need is we need some kind of a unique ID, like a SKU, and then we need a category for that image. So we need the SKU and then I’m gonna say swimsuit. The category is swimsuit. In Creative Force, we build a workflow for products that are categorized as swimsuits. And then our art directors come in and they define what are the shots that we need for a swimsuit. What is the retouching process gonna look like for a swimsuit? What are the technical requirements for images for swimsuits?

And then where do they need to go when we’re done shooting them? Where do they need to be delivered? And they build all of that. And so that’s the bare minimum information that we need. We can accept a ton more information and it can be used in [00:35:00] some really interesting ways. So for one thing, in Creative Force, we build product properties. You can have as many of them, any Creative Force user can have as many properties as they want.

So like literally, if you want to append every single little tidbit of product data that your product team has to an image, we can do that very easily. The other thing I wanna mention is in Creative Force that we can build custom metadata schemas that are readable by Cloudinary, so that we’re not dumping data into containers that don’t make any sense.

Like, we’re not putting the photographer’s name in the description field because that’s all there is. We’re creating a schema that says photographer, stylist, model, color family, season, all of that kind of stuff. So that it’s very clear to anybody looking at that metadata what that data they’re looking at is supposed to be. Right?

So going back to the workflow thing though. In the case of swimsuits, super common for a swimsuit to be reversible. You see it if you’ve ever shot for a swimsuit, especially women’s swimsuits, being reversible is a huge thing. This presents a really unique [00:36:00] problem for photography studios, which is the item that sometimes needs extra images.

It doesn’t always need an extra image, it just sometimes needs extra image. So if a swimsuit needs four images, but if it’s reversible, maybe it needs five images, we can in Creative Force build a workflow that looks at all of those properties and creates basically condition statements. So for the workflow, for swimsuits, we can say, if you look at the metadata property for if it’s reversible, yes or no, and the answer is No, you’re only producing the first four images that you need.

But if the answer to that question in the system is, yes, this swimsuit is reversible, when it goes to the photographer, the photographer’s gonna be alerted that they need this extra shot, right? And so like metadata in that regard becomes super duper important for building super smart workflows that prevent your team from making mistakes in producing the content that they need.

But then that metadata feeds through to the DAM system and is already [00:37:00] appended. And again, it’s adding things as it goes. So when that swimsuit is shot on a model, it’s appending the metadata for that model. Who she is, if you need her measurements in the image, you may need it, maybe you don’t.

But the other things that we can include are usage rights and terms and where this can and cannot be used. So these are big things and I think anybody listening to this podcast has probably experienced that nightmare scenario of where something gets used on social, and it shouldn’t have been, they didn’t actually have permission from that model’s agency to use that on social.

It was only supposed to be used online. That’s a problem that can be solved by having the right metadata in there, and we can add that metadata automatically through the production process without having to have somebody come in and do it after the fact, or do it on mass and all of that stuff.

But more importantly, I don’t see a way into whatever the next era of e-comm technology, the next web, and I don’t know, I don’t profess to know a lot about Web3. I understand there’s two different kind of concepts of Web3, the one that kind of revolves around the blockchain and crypto.

But then there’s the Web3 version that’s called the Semantic Web [00:38:00] that seems to rely very heavily on metadata for visual assets, so images and videos and things like that in order for the semantic web to understand what those things are. That idea has really convinced me that metadata in our images and videos, and 3D rendered assets, all of that stuff in the future is going to be what drives the technology of the next phase of e-commerce.

And so the studios that want to be ahead of the game and be able to take advantage of that quickly when it comes are the studios today that are paying close attention to when and how they’re collecting metadata and trying to automate that as much as possible.

Maribel Mullins: Yeah, I definitely love that you’re mentioning metadata and how this is something that is gonna definitely be used in the future.

There’s so many customers I come across where I hear over and over that they’ve already taken shots of an item and then they don’t realize it exists already within their system. And they’re like, oh, we don’t have any photos for this and I’ll do a reshoot. So I definitely see where collecting the [00:39:00] metadata right at the photo shoot is important.

Sam Brace: One thing I wanna expand on with that, because as we’re pointing out, there’s lots of things that can happen with an overall creative workflow or a creative production workflow particularly. You have the shoot, you have the retouching, you have to make sure that you’re getting all the data that’s associated.

The human components, the machine components, all these different things. To me, it seems like one thing that maybe people should also be considering as they’re part of the workflow is to have two separate repositories for all of this. To say there’s basically something that is in production and then is produced.

If you think about like from a developer standpoint, since we work with tons of developers at Cloudinary, they typically have a production environment, what’s live, and then they have their dev environment or their testing environment and they’re not always linked, but there are ways that they can push very easily from one to the other.

Is that something you’re almost thinking would be a good step for those on the creative side of the [00:40:00] house, the non-developer side of the house, to be thinking about too, taking some of those best practices?

Daniel Jester: You know, it’s really interesting that you say that because I think we at Creative Force have definitely been looking for ways, and I think have found some ways to marry up some best practices in software development and apply them to some of the more creative things. An example of this that may not exactly be what you’re talking about, but it might be interesting for listeners to be aware of, Creative Force operates off of development sprints. So the founders of Creative Force are both big advocates of that type of workflow, the scrum style of workflow, working in sprints, creating things that are like completed, elements of a project at the end of that sprint and sort of building off of that. That way of working has moved into like my department, like in marketing. So we’re working on marketing sprints now. So we have projects, we have x number of projects that we do, that we have two weeks to complete them. Some of them are building blocks for larger things, but many of them are just standalone things that we need to get done.

And so I do see a lot of value in sort of some of the [00:41:00] best practices in software development being applied to some of the creative roles and in some ways you could sort of describe Creative Force as being the development environment a little bit. We describe Creative Force as being a system for assets that are currently in production.

So you can go into Creative Force and you can view any image that exists in Creative Force at any point of the process, and then be able to see where in the process it is and look back at the history of that image as well. So you can look at an asset that’s going through its second round of post production, and then you can click through and see like, where did we start?

Where were the phases that we got in here? And then all of those things, once they’re done and all approved and everybody has viewed these assets and said, these are good to go, then they get pushed to the DAM and now they’re in the live environment.

It’s almost more of a thing that for Creative Force users, it’s a reality today that if you think of Creative Force as being sort of the development environment for their digital assets and then pushing it to the live environment, that is their DAM, it’s just a matter of applying that analogy to a thing that’s existing already today [00:42:00] for many of our customers.

Sam Brace: It’s definitely a case where people can almost use it as like a nice protection layer as well, because a lot of things they were saying with the workflow, like with your example of a fabulous photographer, when you add a human into a step, there’s likely gonna be something that gets missed.

It’s okay, but it happens. Yeah. And I think having it where you can say, okay, we don’t have everything to tie to the workflow, the customer feels it, or business lines feels it. Keeping things separate is something I love the idea of, so I’m glad to hear that you guys are responding well to it, and maybe even a lot of your customer base is doing something similar.

Daniel Jester: In some ways building workflows in Creative Force, there’s a little bit of developer brain that goes into it in some ways.

Sometimes there’s some logic conditions. But I personally am an advocate for saying you’re a new user on Creative Force.

Another specific thing about Creative Force is it’s a multi-client platform, and that’s what allows us to work with retailers, right? So some retailers, they have relationships and conditions with some of the brands that they sell, that they have to shoot those things a certain way.

And so they, they need to [00:43:00] be able to build workflows that reflect that. I’ve always been an advocate for our customers that build themselves the testing environment within Creative Force, you have an idea for a workflow that’s leveraging some product data to do some really smart cool thing using conditions.

By the way, the conditions thing that I described earlier for the reversible swimsuit, that exists in a couple layers of where you can build workflows in Creative Force from very top level layers down to very granular details. But then saying like, build yourself a test environment. Have a set in your studio that’s using that client as a test environment and test your workflow and make sure that it does what you expect it to do.

Cuz the name of the game in a product photography studio, and this is not true, I wanna be very clear. This is not true when you’re working on editorial campaign lifestyle images, that still is very much project focused, that is still very much a finite thing where you’re saying, we have these products.

We’re gonna book this model in this location, we’re gonna produce these images. Creative Force has a tool that supports that. It’s a color editorial module. It works very differently from the product photography module and product photography.[00:44:00] Many of the creative decisions are being made and then sort of cemented into the workflow.

And that’s what makes all of this work, right, is that there isn’t a lot of a ability to change, not that there is an ability to change things on the fly, but our customers need to make some decisions. We’re gonna shoot four images always for this, unless there’s these exceptions, and then we’re gonna shoot these images.

I don’t wanna make it sound inflexible because we’ve been able to build a workflow for every use case any of our customers really have ever had. But the point being is that when you’re shooting product for PDP pages, many of those decisions are made once and then not really made again until somebody decides it’s time for a website refresh, right?

Like six months, eight months, two years down the road, they’re like, oh, what if we put everything on a cream colored background instead of a white colored background? Now you need to go revisit maybe your workflow or your set design or whatever. But that’s one of the key differences between these sort of tandem work ideas between the editorial campaign lifestyle side and the product side at scale where it does it is sometimes less of a project basis and [00:45:00] more of a bunch of stuff is flowing through. We’re shooting all of it, and we need to make sure that our workflow does what we expect it to do because we don’t want to feed a bunch of products into this pipeline and then get halfway through this group of products and find that our workflow is wrong.

And photography, I feel like has always been like this split between sort of artistic and creative and a little bit techy. And so it’s not hard for a lot of our customers in the studio to think about it like this. Like think about the logic problem that Creative Force represents and play around with it and test it a little bit.

The way that I describe it sometimes is there’s a logic to Creative Force that when we release a new feature, you have to learn how it behaves. It’s a little bit of like behavior learning as opposed to learning how something actually functions. Like a lot of things, like anybody who’s ever built a formula in Excel, sometimes there’s an order of operations to get the thing that you want to do accurately.

That’s some of the ways that Creative Force kind of works. So, a long-winded answer to say that I think that that’s a smart way of thinking, and I think there’s a lot of things we can adopt from this technical side, the developer side of things in the way that we think about it. Testing, iterating, all of that stuff, I [00:46:00] think has a lot of value for creative teams.

Maribel Mullins: And do you think it’s varying, when your company’s selling like 50 products versus a million products? I imagine the workflow is different or maybe there’s just like more time allocated to lesser amount of images that you sell versus high quantity.

Daniel Jester: Yeah, for sure. Like some, somebody like Allbirds, like Sam brought up earlier, Allbirds is a company that doesn’t have the product selection or assortment that somebody like Nike has. And the other thing about Nike is that, you know, they own a lot of other brands under the Nike umbrella.

So when you go into the Nike studio, they’re shooting Nike, they’re shooting Converse, they’re shooting, I don’t know what other brands are out there, but with Allbirds, you know, Allbirds might release 10 colorways, and that’ll be it for that quarter. And their photography needs aren’t as heavy of a lift.

What we usually find for those types of brands, I’d call them like mid-size brands a little bit, that they tend to contract with a commercial studio to do that work. Those brands tend to be less aware of what it’s like to run a studio or in need of the software to operate a studio in that way, because they’re [00:47:00] going to somebody like the Line Studios in New York, that’s where Creative Force intersects with some of those brands.

The Line Studios in New York uses Creative Force to manage their studio, but then they’re shooting for some of those brands like All Birds. Trying to think of another like mid-level brand like that. Like… this is so random. The toothbrush. The toothbrush that was really popular that they started selling in Target.

You know, like it got a really popular brand. I can’t, I’m blanking on the name now, but that I feel in my mind.

Yeah. Quip. Quip is, yeah, Quip is a very all birdy type of brand, right? Kind of born of the internet age. They don’t have a huge product assortment. They don’t have huge product photography needs.

I might be speaking out of turn, I have no idea if Allbirds or Quip has a studio in house. They totally might. But typically what you see with brands that only have something like 50 products for that year, that quarter, aren’t always investing and running a studio for themselves, unless they just really want to control the process.

They’re gonna contract with the commercial studio. Some of them use Creative Force, some of them don’t.

The commercial studio relationship with [00:48:00] Creative Force is really unique because they really have to have all of these different clients set up. Like we have a studio, ShowLabs based outta Colorado who operates Creative Force.

They do a lot of work with outdoor brands and having a software solution to manage that is absolutely critical because every single brand they work with has a different style guide, a different way that they need to receive images, a different place they have to deliver those images to, but ShowLabs can deliver directly to the DAM systems of all of their customers if they want to because they can integrate right in.

It’s a heavy lift for a commercial studio just to do what they do to manage all of that stuff. But even with something like Creative Force, because again, we’re automating all of those parts of the things that can go terribly wrong, if a human is in charge of them, you can realize a lot of benefits there.

Sam Brace: To be honest, I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface. It’s one of those things where the more that we can just keep talking about these workflows, talk about the things that we need to be thinking about when it comes to e-commerce best practices, and making sure that it’s tied to all of the creative production sides of that, I think that the nice thing about it [00:49:00] is, of course, we can only talk about this for about an hour or so, but you have a full podcast where you’re talking to e-commerce professionals of all shapes and sizes. So where can people listen to that? Where can they find out more?

Daniel Jester: Yeah. Thank you for mentioning that. I host the e-Commerce Content Creation podcast. We are available on basically every podcast platform, wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts. And then also you can find our sort of internet home for our podcast is creative operations.com, where we have all of our episodes. Every week, every Tuesday, we release new episodes. We’ve had guests of all types. We definitely focus on e-commerce content production.

That tends to be a little bit focused on studios, but we also have a ton of episodes that are just generalized sort of professional development.

Sam Brace: I love it and it definitely is nice to show that we took people to like a certain mile marker, but we can keep this conversation going very deeply if people decide to go do so. So that’s wonderful. And then also in terms of just your overall social presence, the Daniel Jester [00:50:00] brand, where can people be going to learn more about the things you’re doing outside of the podcast?

Maybe just thoughts that you have that you’re sharing out in the world.

Daniel Jester: Yeah, thanks for asking about that too. Most of my interactions are on LinkedIn. Like I live a pretty hardy LinkedIn lifestyle. I’m posting there a couple of times a week and I’m usually pretty engaged with different things going on over there.

Sam Brace: And then Maribel, we’ve touched upon this throughout this entire episode, that there’s integrations between cloudinary and Creative Force. But let’s say that someone’s listening to like, well, how do I become like Creative Force and become a partner and work with Cloudinary? Where should they go?

Maribel Mullins: On Cloudinary, we have our website where you can go to our partners pages, Cloudinary dot com slash partners.

We have a tech partner section and it has like how to build your own integration and who you can contact and best practices on when you’re building your integration. So check that out and reach out and you’re probably gonna get connected to me and so excited to hopefully work with you.

Sam Brace: And I will say, so you don’t have to say [00:51:00] it, but I fully believe it, that if anybody does get connected to you, they’re in very good hands. I can’t believe the amount of service you provide. So hopefully Creative Force has felt that, I know that I’m sure that many other tech partners have too.

Daniel Jester: Yeah, I can back that up. Maribel, you and I have only met briefly, but in the course of meeting and working through this and the event that we were planning on seeing each other at, you’ve been great. So yeah, Maribel, good get for you guys at Cloudinary.

Maribel Mullins: Aw, thanks. Appreciate it.

Sam Brace: For all of you guys have taken the time to listen to us all the way to the end, thank you. This is wonderful to have you to be a podcast listener, podcast consumer in this way. And of course, just as Daniel is saying about his own podcast, if you are so inclined to keep listening, make sure to give us a like, give us us a subscribe.

Let us know what you think of this overall program and stick around because we’re gonna be putting out more and more regular episodes, talking about the trends with the visual economy in upcoming MX Matters episodes. So on behalf of everybody at Cloudinary, I imagine on behalf of [00:52:00] everybody at Creative Force as well, thank you for taking the time and we’ll see you at the next episode.