The E-commerce Content Creation Podcast

Summary

We are in the holiday season where no matter where you go, you cannot avoid retailers letting you know what your friends and family probably want for their holiday gifts. Here on this podcast we aren’t doing a gift guide per se, but in this episode Lauren Stefaniak Smith and Kimmy Snow share with Daniel what they think makes a GREAT gift guide. 

Key Takeaways

• Determining assortment
  • Assess whether your brand / product line / ethos lends itself to something giftable (and don’t force it if not)
    • Makes me think about the VS product line of bras/panties v. sleepwear items like packaged PJs, robes & slippers, beauty giftsets
    • Gifting isn’t really a time to push a new product; it’s more a time to push your best sellers; either as single items or packaged as a gift set
  • Crafting a story through product is inauthentic & irrelevant – customers often shop for 1 gift item & this is not about building a cart
  • Assort into items that are truly giftable
    • Whimsical / aspirational: items the receiver would not buy for themselves; often expensive & luxurious
    • Thoughtful: often sentimental or personalized; typically are not quick purchases and require longer lead times
    • Practical: often the easiest and most accessible; tend to be less expensive
    • GIFT CARDS, you cannot go wrong with a gift card
  • Think about building an array of products that span a wide price range
  • Buy deep
• Reuse of catalog imagery
  • Here’s where you tell a cohesive story
  • Would err on the side of reusing ecommerce product photography, but would use this moment to shoot a guide-specific editorial/emotional moment
• Gifts you’ve received that you love, or other great gift ideas
  • Artist watercolor painting of a wedding photo
  • Le Labo Discovery Set
  • Vinebox 12 Nights of Wine
  • Ember Mug
  • 3D printer pen

Discount Code

Reminder to use code ECCP to get your first month of PhotoRoom Pro for free! Thanks to the PhotoRoom team for the generous offer. 

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

Summary

We’re getting into that time of year where we start reflecting on the past year. We at Creative Force have a year’s worth of product updates, feature releases, and bug fixes that we’re pretty proud of. In this episode Daniel sits down with Creative Force’s CTO Tejs Rasmussen, where we run down his top 3 releases of 2022. You’ll be shocked at number 1. 

Key Takeaways

• Tejs Top 3 Features in 2022
  • 3. Updated Category Management
    • This was a small but very important quality of life update that makes category management much easier for our users.
  • 2. Video
    • Creative Force made two releases that focused on video, initially releasing support for tracking and uploading videos, and then following it up with much more functionality, allowing for review & selection, mark up, external post processing, etc. 
  • 1. Property Alerts
    • Creative Force works by leveraging your product data to create smart workflows, but the smartest workflows are the ones that include a smart work force, and that's why Creative Force uses that same data to provide contextual information to your productions teams, when they need it. 
• Honorable Mentions
  • Delivery Matrix
  • Updated mark up for image notation.
  • Containers
• Coming in 2023
  • Planning
    • Scheduling, set and talent management, going into beta in 2023
  • Copywriting
    • Many studios have copywriters and other web team type roles that physically sit in the studio, having copywriting as part of your content production will allow Creative Force studios to expand their management best practices to other areas beyond imagery. 
  • Editorial
    • While Editorial was launched in 2021, expect to see updates that include the ability to collaborate even further. 

Discount Code

Reminder to use code ECCP to get your first month of PhotoRoom Pro for free! Thanks to the PhotoRoom team for the generous offer. 

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

Summary

Picture Instruments is a maker of automated imaging devices and software, everything from all in one studio solutions with automated product & lighting control, to plugins and stand alone software packages. Daniel had the pleasure of hosting Robin Ochs and Austin Timyan on the podcast for this episode, so they could share with him a bit about the origins of the company and where they see themselves growing in the future. 

Key Takeaways

• Picture Instruments began with one tool that Hensel encouraged the team to tak
• The companies growth has been organic, and a bit niche focused. Picture Instruments has built its features and software components based on the needs of customers as they come. Wine sellers, car companies and dealerships, and beyond. 
• While each unique customers solution is specific to them, Picture Instruments doesn't overextend on the customization. Features are developed that benefit as many customers as possible. 
• Picture Instruments also sells some of it's software as stand alone pieces, available to end users who need plugins for various types of work. 

Discount Code

Reminder to use code ECCP to get your first month of PhotoRoom Pro for free! Thanks to the PhotoRoom team for the generous offer. 

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

Summary

Does one size fit all when it comes to our content strategy? That’s the question we posed to todays guest, Charlotte Cole, Senior Director of Content Development at Farfetch. Spoiler alert, the answer is not yes. We discuss personalization, regionalization, localization and all the factors that go into an effective global content strategy. 

Key Takeaways

• Does one size fit all? No. It never has, but there wasn't many options to serve your many customer segments. 
• The e-comm landscape has learned a lot in recent years that points to this need. The political and social landscape does shape how your customers shop. 
• In fashion, we've often spoken about our customers in too narrow of terms. You need many more personas and subsections, or an entire shift in the way you think about your customers. 
• At Farfetch, content creation has become de-centralized in order to make better content for those customers. 
• Personalization is really a sort of catch all term in how the experience is built. While it CAN be, it's not only about getting an ad specifically for you or receiving a mailer with your name on it. 
• At Victorias Secret, personalization and regionalization are two halves of the same whole. It helps you get the customer to not just A shopping experience, but the RIGHT shopping experience. 
• DEI means different things to different cultures. What diversity means is different when you're in a predominately western culture vs. the other cultures around the world. 
• It may require another approach to branding. Build a system that allows many diverse team members create content that is ON BRAND while culturally relevant. 
• Translation is NOT the same thing as localization. 
• For global success in content strategy, you have to learn everything you can about your customer. 
• What's the ROI on creative? We still don't know but we're really REALLY trying. 

Discount Code

Reminder to use code ECCP to get your first month of PhotoRoom Pro for free! Thanks to the PhotoRoom team for the generous offer. 

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

Summary

In creative production there are many roles and skills that pull together to make the magic happen, and each of those team members have a perspective on how things shake out. One very unique role in creative production is the Hair and Makeup artist. Present on almost every production that requires human talent, the hair and makeup artist sees it all and is impacted directly by every other role. Joining Daniel for this episode is Cathi Singh, Southern California based hair and makeup artist, to talk about how shooting stills and video changes how she approaches her job, and the trends she’s seeing in the types of content being produced. 

Key Takeaways

• When considering how to tackle hair and make up for stills vs. video, there are considerations you need to make to ensure not only continuity between stills and video, but also how the nature of video changes what you can get away with.
• In stills production you can get away with a lot more because of the locked perspective and the fact that nothing moves. You can place hair elements where you need them, and you can use make up to cover things in stills that don't work in video.
• Art direction also should probably move toward more natural and product focused.
• As a hair and make up artist, Cathi must remember that she isn't selling her hair styling skill, but selling the product featured.
• How you approach the shoot for still and video has an impact as well, are you bouncing between stills and video or shooting stills on day 1 and video on day 2.
• Somehow we ended up talking about task switching, as related to stills and video.
• A challenge for campaign shoots in the future: reduce you deliverables per day by 10%, just to see how that impacts the team and quality of the work.
• Many shoots that Cathi is working on are shooting multiple vintage formats on top of digital

Discount Code

Reminder to use code ECCP to get your first month of PhotoRoom Pro for free! Thanks to the PhotoRoom team for the generous offer. 

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

Summary

An interesting problem that many creative teams don’t think of as a problem is the static nature of the photograph. By their very nature, photographs are snapshots in time and making changes to that snapshot historically has been inconceivable, impossible. Our guest in this episode is Robert Alhborg, former fashion photographer turned co-founder and chief Product Officer of Looklet, a fashion tech company that challenges the idea that fashion imagery is static by nature, and is working to unlock a new world of capabilities and synergies between creative production and e-commerce teams.

Key Takeaways

• Looklet was founded 10 years, a fashion tech company that has deconstructed the process of fashion photography for big retailers and brands.
• Customers can shoot models and garments separately, even in different parts of the world, and compile those elements into an image that is hard to distinguish from a traditional photo shoot.
• These images become dynamic. You can take an image you love and replace the apparel within the image.
• Roberts background is as a fashion photographer, his experience taught him that scaling fashion photography is very difficult.
• With Looklet, you can maintain a smaller, faster studio and still produce high quality on figure photography.
• In this deconstructed style of photography, you can change out articles that maybe are out of stock or no longer for sale, and not have to reshoot because of these reasons.
• The main thing for Looklet clients is being able to try new things. A/B testing imagery, Personalization, Regionalization, etc.
• Looklet also enables broader options for talent. You no longer have to book the same models everytime you shoot, you can perhaps afford to book a celebrity model and then use those assets for a long time, changing looks as you need them.
• One of the challenges are e-commerce websites that are to rigid to allow for regionalization or personalization.
• There is a big opportunity for a forward thinking creative team to use a platform to its fullest capability.
• Looklet creates a new layer of cross functionality between studio/creative teams and ecomm/web teams.
• Looklets biggest challenge in the near future is balancing their own road map with features that clients want, and finding the right clients to take personalization to the next level. 

Discount Code

Reminder to use code ECCP to get your first month of PhotoRoom Pro for free! Thanks to the PhotoRoom team for the generous offer. 

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

Summary

Elle Mitchel and Arabela Espinoza, the duo behind Weekend Creative, have made a name for themselves as being fun to work with, producing great content for their client brands, and generally being excellent people. That’s not sheer luck, they run a business and have learned a lot over the last several years about how to run it successfully. We invited Weekend Creative to the podcast to give our audience tips on how they can set themselves up for success when working with an external agency or studio.

Key Takeaways

• When approaching a commercial studio or agency for work on your creative project, having a sense of budget and deliverables is a great start. 
• You should investigate the agency that you want to work with. Understand their body of work and style. Having an idea of what you like from the agency you choose makes it easier to get on the same page earlier. 
• Approach the relationship as a partnership. True creative partners where the brand provides input on what is important to the brand and the agency executes that in accordance with their style. 
• There are many practical needs to approaching the external agency or studio, but don't neglect the emotional needs. You should be excellent to work with. 
• Be prepared to be told No. Agencies are businesses in their own right, with values, capacity, ability to execute on certain things, etc. 
• Time and money can unlock a lot of great creative, but you have to respect that it requires that investment. 
• It makes for a challenging relationship if you contract with an agency or studio and treat them like an extension of your full time team. 
• Be a champion for your contractor, internally and externally. 
• It's all about communication. 

Discount Code

Reminder to use code ECCP to get your first month of PhotoRoom Pro for free! Thanks to the PhotoRoom team for the generous offer. 

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

Summary

As we draw ever closer to the next big thing in e-commerce, the fog of what exactly its going to be starts to thin out a little bit. I feel comfortable saying with some amount of certainty that regardless of what becomes of virtual environments such as the metaverse, 3D interactions will become part of the e-commerce experience. My evidence of that is Ben Conway of VNTANA. VNTANA is a 3D infrastructure platform that enables management, optimization and distribution of 3D assets, both for the purposes of internal product development and design, and consumer facing applications such as 3D models of products they want to buy.

Key Takeaways

• VNTANA is a 3D infrastructure platform. VNTANA enables 3D capabilities across the entire lifecycle of the product or asset.
• VNTANA works in three primary areas of 3D asset creation: Management, Optimization, Distribution
• The platform allows users to work with 3D files across locations and workflows, and can even distribute those assets in customer facing e-commerce use cases
• VNTANA can compress 3D assets by 90% or more, to enable better management of those workflows.
• Many VNTANA customers are fashion brands, and they use the tool for multiple internal and external touch points.
• VNTANA started on the end consumer side of the business and found that they may have been too early for that, but their customers were getting a lot of value upstream.
• VNTANA has customer who saw return rates in some categories go from 25% to 8% thanks to the ability of the customer to understand scale in a more meaningful way.
• Ben sees a future where virtual shoe try on is everywhere, virtual clothing try on is available but largely for entertainment, but applying physics of fabric characteristics is used to help aid virtual try on and adds value in some ways.

Discount Code

Reminder to use code ECCP to get your first month of PhotoRoom Pro for free! Thanks to the PhotoRoom team for the generous offer. 

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

Summary

This Halloween Studio Nightmares is back for Volume 2. You’ll hear about Faye Garland working in a haunted studio, Christopher Kern and the case of the 0kb image files, Caitlin Andrews and the mystery party, Cathi Singh getting trapped, and the night Daniel Jester stayed in a haunted hotel room.

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

Summary

As an elder millennial Daniel still finds himself awestruck at the technology that we have available to us in our phones. Literally at our fingertips. As a career product photographer, Daniel has tried every iphone app that professes to be able to remove the background from an image, and they have always fallen short of being a serious tool. This is actually true of not just apps, but plugins and even some native photoshop features. Photoshop select and mask is still somehow very easily fooled by tones that are too similar. The solution to this problem, for small businesses and independent creators, is pretty expensive. Hiring a retoucher or service increases the cost of producing images and lengthens the lead time exponentially. Matthieu Rouif of PhotoRoom, recognized an opportunity and knew the engineers who could solve this problem. PhotoRoom was born and has taken off very quickly. With close to 40 million downloads, and Matthieu has seen users of all types, from all backgrounds, all over the world, find a solution with PhotoRoom. 

Discount Code

Use code ECCP to get your first month of PhotoRoom Pro for free! Thanks to the PhotoRoom team for the generous offer. 

Key Takeaways

• Matthieu was always interested in light and photography, and focused on the science of light at Stanford University. This was in the earlier days of the iPhone and Matthieu wanted to get into photography in some way, it made more sense to make apps for the iphone that supported photography, then try to develop hardware as well as software. 
• After some time working for GoPro when they bought the app that Matthieu founded,  he worked with some brilliant machine learning engineers to develop and app that could support the creative needs of small brands, independent creators, and other "Businesses Of Passion."
• PhotoRoom has grown quickly with a brilliant app that functions much better than most competing apps or features. In Daniel's own tests, PhotoRoom outperformed every other app and the iOS 16 feature 
• PhotoRoom now has close to 40 million downloads
• PhotoRoom uses AI to not only remove the background, but understand what it is you're selling, and help guide you to templates or settings that are optimized for what you're selling, the region you're in, and more. 
• PhotoRoom has observed many users like to use the app for personal use, and then discover that it is powerful enough to solve problems they have at work. 

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com