The Backstory
I often liken the Ecommerce studio production process to a pointillism painting. People viewing the process from far away, don’t realize that the process is actually made of thousands of “dots” tiny decisions, people, equipment, and context. They usually only see the larger steps. They’ll say, “You receive products, you shoot them, you edit them, write the copy, and upload them. How hard can that be?” “How can it possibly take days before this is done?” “What could take so long in such an easy, straightforward process?” This is easy to think if you’re not close enough to see “the dots”.
What Are These Dots?
The dots are the errors in the catalog data that someone has to troubleshoot and correct. The dots are the new photographer who accidentally uploaded images into the wrong shared drive, and no one notices until the buyers are complaining about why their products aren’t live. The dots are all of the little manual touch-points, responsibilities, shared spreadsheets that are manually updated which leaves room for tons of errors.
The dots are one system dedicated to physical inventory management, another dedicated to images, another dedicated to copy production, and another system for attempting to track whether or not the copy and images made it to their final destination.
The dots are where things get lost, errors are made, delays occur, and hope is lost. Team members get frustrated, managers are accountable but can’t gather the data fast enough before the next fire alarm has been pulled. Welcome to just another day in Production.
So you’ve taken a closer look at the process. You’ve seen the whole, for the dots, that make it up but how can you connect them? How do you move your pointillism process into a smooth fresco? Based on my experience I believe it’s in the fabric of the workflow, and that fabric is a centralized end-to-end workflow software.
The Need for a Centralized Workflow Platform
This is exactly what Studio Bridge was designed to be. A single source of truth that takes product information from your catalog, works directly with your WMS, automatically renames images and moves them to the correct destination of the process, and allows for copywriters to see the images as soon as they’re shot so that they can input copy and submit for final review in to your desired final destination.
Because every decision, input, scan, approval, rejection is happening within this single workflow you now can pull data so that you don’t have to spend an hour troubleshooting through multiple systems just to see that a physical product was returned to the warehouse before it received all of its necessary shots.
You can catch that the stylist missed the special feature of a jacket being reversible before the model has left for the day, or that a brand runs a little large so it’s recommended that the customer orders one size down, and that needs to go in the description.
Unfortunately, more often than not, there tends to be quite a gap in perspective between the end-users in the studio (the ones battling the daily fires) and the stakeholders seeing the process from afar (the ones responsible for leading/approving solutions).
For us, at Studio Bridge we know this and can help! Just speaking from my own experience, at one point or another I’ve sat at each of the vantage points. So having a deep understanding of what each of the stakeholders involved would be looking for is something we’re no stranger to. In other words, we can help everyone in your organization from the CXO level to Junior members see and connect the dots. Should you be in the market to implement a single workflow tool that can take your studio production to the next level, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the Studio Bridge team, we’d love to chat with you!