Operations
The day-to-day of running product content: photography pipelines, catalogue launches, syndication to marketplaces, and the workflow between the people who shoot, tag, write and publish. Most catalogue problems are operational rather than technical, and this is where they get fixed.
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The catalogue launch checklist
The things that go wrong on a catalogue launch are the same things every time, which means they can be checked. This is the pre-flight list, ordered so that the checks which take days to fix happen before the ones that take minutes.
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Product photography without a studio backlog
The backlog is rarely caused by the shooting. It is caused by setups that change between sessions, frames that have to be reshot because nobody agreed the angles, and a post-production step that exists only to make crops.
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Running product content as an operation
Product content is treated as a project when a season launches and as nobody’s job for the rest of the year. That is why the same problems recur every season. Here is what it looks like when it is run as a standing operation instead.
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The product image workflow, shoot to storefront
Between the camera and the product page there are usually seven handoffs, four of them manual, and one queue where everything waits. Most catalogue delays are in that queue, not in the shoot and not in the site.