eCommerce - The Guide to Scaling Creative Production

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Introduction

There’s tons of great eCommerce industry content out there that talks in loose terms about ‘scaling’. More output, more clients, more growth. That’s just about the size of it when it comes to the logic in pursuit of the ultimate goal.

For all the talk of scale, it’s been a while since we’ve noticed any eCommerce and eCommerce photography content that stops to remind the room what ‘scaling’ actually is. Because, let’s be under no illusion, ‘scaling’ is different to ‘growth’; one is a consequence of the other but comes with very different and specific parameters.

Before we wade out into the mechanics of how to scale eCommerce creative production, it’s worth taking a brief detour with a ‘back-to-basics’ reminder of ‘scale’ vs ‘growth’.

What is SCALE and what is GROWTH ( and why does it matter)

eCommerce or not, growing your business is about increasing available resources in pursuit of increasing profit; more input, more output. In eCommerce that can mean increasing product lines, team size and capital investments in proportion to revenue growth.

The revenue you’ll generate will be offset by resourcing to sell more products. In that sense the business grows in size but may not necessarily grow in terms of profit.

Ok. What about scaling your eCommerce business? What’s different vs growing it. Scaling a business means boosting revenue without investing additional resources, or making negligible investment. As you scale, your revenue grows while your fixed overheads remain fairly stable.

Why does the ‘scale’ vs ‘growth’ distinction matter? Because heavy investments in growth—although necessary at the right time—create more financial risk than scaling which can be implemented more sustainably alongside broader, well-timed growth pushes. So, it’s fair to say scaling should be your ultimate goal. For eCommerce creatives and photo studios, that means first scaling the conversation both internally and with partners about what the best buttons are to push so that creative production is curated around a ‘scaling’ mindset.

What is SCALE and what is GROWTH ( and why does it matter)

Why does the ‘scale’ vs ‘growth’ distinction matter?

Because heavy investments in growth— although necessary at the right time— create more financial risk than scaling which can be implemented more sustainably alongside broader, welltimed growth pushes. So, it’s fair to say scaling should be your ultimate goal. For eCommerce creatives and photo studios, that means first scaling the conversation both internally and with partners about what the best buttons are to push so that creative production is curated around a ‘scaling’ mindset.

Scale Means Proving Value

To successfully scale eCommerce creative production, it makes sense to first identify where the blockers in your creative workflow are that hold things back and which of those produce the most convincing costbenefit assessment. Remember, your biggest barrier to progress might be the most expensive to resolve—in which case it’s a growth challenge, not a challenge of scaling. When eCommerce studios are assessing factors and frictions that block the road to scaling, they should look for pinch points that need little net investment to smooth out, while still returning worthwhile creative production perks.

More creative assets, better quality product photography

Let’s suppose the goal is ‘more creative visual-asset’ or ‘better quality product photography’ both of which would convert more product sales.

If your eCommerce studio is in-house, a growth mindset would look at the problem and conclude “we need more investment” or “we need to hire more photographers”. if you’re an independent eCommerce photo creative or agency, your eCommerce client might conclude “we need to replace our product photography partner”.

For the latter two, having eCommerce clients arrive at that conclusion spells bad vibes. Which is why, for freelancers and studio agencies, the ability to convince clients you can scale creative production will confer a market

Scale Means Proving Value

advantage over those that can’t. A shiny portfolio is a must, but it’s worth little if the eCommerce brands looking can’t trust that you’ll deliver beautiful quality consistently in high volume.

Ok, so back to the goal: “we need more or better eCommerce creative digital assets’’. We already saw it from a ‘growth’ mindset. A ‘scale’ mindset would look at this goal and prescribe this solution “we need to speed up our creative digital asset lifecycle”, or “we need to reduce down all the moving parts of our creative workflow management processes.”

More resources? Or more efficiency?

revenue from scaling into growth. That’s all well and good on paper, but arriving at the ‘scale-mindset’ conclusions means proving the value of rolling out scaling incentives by getting people around you to see the challenges you see in the same way, through a single viewfinder.

This is easier said than done. Especially in a disintegrated eCommerce space increasingly reliant on busy thirdparty ecosystems in which different stakeholders silo around different challenges and priorities.

In short, the growth mindset wants to grow resources. The scale mindset wants to grow efficiency. Once you get to a point where efficiency reaches a hard ceiling, then it’s time to invest the

The first step is bringing stakeholders together that live at different points in the creative asset lifecycle to prove the value of making scale-oriented tweaks to the shared environment.

Finding Workflow Pain Overlaps

Part of the answer to pinpointing mutual blockers to scaling creative production in eCommerce is having a mutual conversation. This should involve leaders and teams up and down stream from each other in the creative production value chain.

add to that ‘in-group’ thinking and the tribal thinking that comes with it. All of this makes it a real drag just getting the right people to the table with an open, collaborative attitude.

Compare KPIs, mutual friction in creative ecosystems

In a perfect world, this ‘creative powwow’ and a ‘coming together’ of eCommerce leaders, merchandisers and photography studios would be a breeze to arrange. The reality is that many studios struggle with high-friction relationships with other creative teams in the chain.

Still, achieving the cross-department or multi-stakeholder dialogue is the right channel for finding the mutual overlaps of creative production hurdles. The key is in approaching processreview conversations with a good-faith attitude that avoids finger-pointing and accusational tones.

Often these relationship tensions can orbit around the fact that different teams are using different creative tech stacks, creating multiple nodes in the workflow that don’t always join up harmoniously—

Start with simply asking the right questions

“What are you guys struggling with on your side?”

“We’re taking forever to achieve x, y and z at our end. How about you?”

Finding Workflow Pain Overlaps

Don’t ask these questions rhetorically. Express to stakeholders that you’re not asking rhetorically and that you’re genuinely interested in uncovering answers. Tell them you’re asking exactly the same questions internally at your end”. Once they sense your real, pragmatic intent, they’ll be more encouraged to come out of their silos and map everything out on the table with you.

time in each other’s departments or spaces to review what skills and ways of working are applied as digital assets move through each stage of their lifecycle to production.

A small caveat: in some contexts and cases inter-team shadowing may do more harm than good where creative partner relationships have become borderline toxic, so make sure to weigh up this option against the right backdrop of factors.

Inter-team shadowing can unblock progress

Another great way of bridging the gap between disconnected eCommerce creative stakeholders is inter-team shadowing. This involves spending

For blossoming eCommerce and studio partnerships, or collaborative relationships that hit turbulence after prolonged periods of harmony, interteam shadowing can be constructively suggested without much risk of blowback.

Whether this is achieved through interteam shadowing exercises or not, the ultimate aim should be to knowledge-

“Have you identified what the blockers are that are causing these extended time frames?”

Finding Workflow Pain Overlaps

share, find mutual blockers, make practical suggestions and humbly admit internally how others in your ecosystem are doing things better.

Once you’ve uncovered mutual areas where creative workflows could be uncluttered, sped up or made more efficient, then you can have the relatively simpler conversation about how to resolve shared bottlenecks and work toward a common goal of scaling creative eCommerce assets.

Bring Your DAM Integration A-GAME

Bust Silos, Streamline, And Scale

At the start of this eBook we talked about how ‘scaling’ is a term thrown around that isn’t often revisited in terms of its raw definition vs ‘growth’. Integration is another one of those industry-favorites. Of course, the definition of integration isn’t difficult; it’s simply ‘reducing the number of moving parts’ while still being able to achieve the same (or better) outcomes.

you worked (or will work) so hard to have collaborations crawl out from—to talk about what’s stopping you all from scaling eCommerce creative workflows.

Waste communication reinforces the silos

When it comes to scaling eCommerce visual content production, creative tech stack and process integration can be your number-one driving force that truly puts on the afterburners.

More than that, DAM integration can have peripheral perks of breaking down those silos we talked about in the previous section. You know? The ones

Think about your current creative workflows. What processes do your studio photo assets go through before they’ve even been shipped to the next step in their lifecycle? Once they do, how often do they come back to you for retouching, feedback implementation or revision.

Amid all this back-and-forth, eCommerce product photographers, merchandisers, Art Directors and Creative Directors bury each other in

Bring Your DAM Integration A-GAME

email and phone communication from their silos.

The sheer strain of keeping track of countless communication threads across countless project workflows means that the currency of communication becomes expensive. Often, labored exchanges over minor actions are worth little actual progress.

Worse still, the time investment in communication streams creates a startstop environment of distraction that breeds frustration. This is especially true of visual creatives who need to be locked into their zone bringing attractive brand relevance to stunning product photography. You only need to look at ‘listicles’ of top ‘time-sucks’ for creatives to know that email and instant message communication is right up there.

The net loss on content production is a rolling, low-level anxiety that hampers creative workflows. Collaboration becomes strained. Slowly but surely, the silos become increasingly entrenched.

Headless DAM integration reduces waste communication & speeds up everything Digital asset management and creative workflow management are nothing new. Chances are, your eCommerce studio or studio partners already use a DAM platform of one kind or other.But that’s just the problem; even traditional DAM systems—whose job it is to create order—are dispersed and siloed within different teams upstream and downstream.

Bring Your DAM Integration A-GAME

Each point in the digital asset lifecycle sees only a small portion of the picture. That explains the constant email oneliner communication, daily check-ins and ‘ASAP’ retouch requests between eCommerce marketers, Art Directors and studio creative teams.

The custom integrations that headless DAM allows(with the help of APIs) bind together project management tools, CRMs and even email management platforms. Instead of constant feedback and approval requests, daily communication on asset progress milestones are automated into a background narrative of auto-updates and native, in-platform notifications and discreet confirmations.

picks up the slack on comms admin and housekeeping. All the right stakeholders are kept in the loop with all the right creative-workflow updates at the right time. Everyone sees the whole picture and the moving bar of progress. Creatives can be creative, Art Directors get what they need faster and eCommerce teams can rely on their studios to start scaling content production.

All of those frantic daily communication threads disintegrate into redundancy because integrated communication

ONE eCommerce CREATIVE HUB

One Flow, All The Scale

Reducing waste communication in the eCommerce creative workflow alone isn’t the answer to scaling content production. Even with the most streamlined collaborative workflows, scaling up production means scaling down daily digital asset management admin which starts the moment assets are created and ends when they’re archived, post-distribution.

From brief to distribution:

In record time

With eCommerce studios churning out 100s of product photography briefs annually, turning briefs into usable digital assets is the first hurdle to overcome for scaling eCommerce content production.

To turn briefs around quickly and consistently, markup, individual project assignments, versioning and approval all need to move forward at the same pace to prevent interdependencies from bringing the whole show to a grinding halt.

ONE eCommerce CREATIVE HUB

One Flow, All The Scale

Building your integrated eCommerce creative hub

To resolve this, eCommerce teams and their studio partners are turning to nextgeneration, headless DAM platforms able to cater for markup, assignments, versioning, approval, asset search (using metadata) and asset archiving all in a single shared space.

The net gain of this headless, shared hub approach to creative workflow management is 100s of hours saved on the ‘managing’ part and a whole lot more time spent actually creating beautiful eCommerce assets.

Conclusion

Sustainably scaling eCommerce creative production is ultimately about knowing the difference between a ‘scale’ mindset and a ‘growth’ mindset.

Take care of scale, and growth takes care of itself. But first eCommerce creative ecosystems must align and agree on exactly what’s holding them back. Once the overlapping points of friction are identified, they can be systematically ironed out through negligible investments in headless digital asset management and creative workflow integration—the net gains can be staggering, even in the short term.

are absolutely vital today. Too many large creative operations teams are still operating without the technical and procedural advances that enable their competitors to accelerate schedules and cut costs. It’s the kind of disadvantage that takes a toll on an organization and its people.

These and other important improvements are largely achieved with the addition of new technology solutions into the creative production process. Software has the capability to manage the scale and layer on the communication and security capabilities that were nice to have five years ago but

About globaledit

Since 2003, Globaledit has been a trusted partner to major brands in retail, fashion, health & beauty, entertainment and ecommerce. Our creative asset management platform creates efficiencies in photo production workflows and processes, making it an essential collaboration platform for creatives.

Globaledit is part of the CoCreativ. CoCreativ is a Creative Content Agency Studio Network dedicated to providing scalable creative solutions through Content Agency strategy, creativity, and execution. We serve the industry, along with their brands and agencies, by delivering end-toend Content Agency solutions to create and run programs at scale, more efficiently.