Speeding up the photo shooting process by letting go of spreadsheets
A case of improving business processes to increase CX - Written by Gabriela Leticia, CX and Data Analyst at AMARO
At AMARO, collections are a thing of the past, here, we have new launches every week. In fact, we have around 100 new products per week that need to be activated on our website. That amount of new pieces every week means lots of photoshoots and description sessions need to be completed in order to make our lookbooks.
If you look at this process from the customer’s point of view, you’ll see it has everything to do with product discovery, which is a key point in our customer journey. We always need to make sure that they have an excellent preview of what they’re getting and the only surprise ahead of them is how great our product quality is.
In this article, I’ll talk about how we found a tool to help us become more focused and organized in this process. This not only allows our team to have a seamless workflow with more focus on creativity, but it also creates a better experience for our customers.
How we work
We can describe our daily work routine as 11 steps that lead us to deliver a great picture for the website. That includes styling, shooting, filming, post-production, and writing the description. Those steps are organized into 4 cycles that depend on each other and need to be executed at the right timing so that no product goes online missing a photo or a great description.
To synchronize that, we’ve always relied on several spreadsheets. This process was time-consuming and made it hard for us to have metrics. So we decided to search for a solution.
What we needed was a tool that would be easy to use, have a straightforward process, be simple to create reports from, and be connected to our internal database — where we have all the information the studio team needs throughout the process, such as:
- Important dates (when will products arrive in the studio and when will it go online?);
- Specific info about styling and design inspiration (what was the designer thinking when she created that piece?);
- Current inventory (is the product already available in the distribution center?);
- Details about the product itself (does it have any specific elements that should be featured in the photo?).
And another important point: we needed to make sure that nothing went missing along the way.
The Solution
After a long search, we got to know Airtable, the tool that would have all the features we needed. Airtable is a friendly database that, in their own words, “lets you organize anything you can imagine”. In my words, it’s a spreadsheet with the power of a database and terrific UX.
With Airtable we are able to:
- Develop our own customized solution that helped us with our timeline of steps. In it, we have views for each of those 11 steps, and we organize them in a way that whenever one step is over, the fashion product automatically appears on the visualization of the next step. Using the checkbox fields available in the tool, we can make sure every dependent step is complete before the next step.
- Create quick analyses. We use the “block sessions” feature to create quick reports for each type of user, which gives us more information on what has already been completed and what has yet to be done.
- Minimizing labor-intensive steps. Instead of manually inputting each product, with the app, we can simply scan the barcode to “check-in” items upon arrival at the studio.
All that was left was the connection to our internal database, and here’s where I fit in in this whole process.
When I stepped in, the tool was already being used and we were gaining a lot of efficiency and clarity. But the studio team could only take photos of products that had been manually pre-registered on Airtable.
How did we make the upload and update processes automatic?
The solution for this connection involved the use of Airtable’s API, as well as Looker’s API, (where all of our ETLs reside).
We developed a solution with Python that extracts everything we need from Looker, transforms it, and delivers it to Airtable in a specific table. Therefore, we can skip the manual pre-registration, and the information on Airtable is automatically updated.
In the transformation, we deal with all of our business rules. In our context, that can be anything from filtering which products are available for a potential shooting, to understanding how our barcode system works. It also means understanding how to better structure data so the updates needed are less time-consuming. For example, we transformed all the numerical data to ranges, turning it into categorical data. That makes the update process faster, and it doesn’t make a big difference for the final user.
Airtable is collaborative and is used by multiple people, so, something we’ve worried about was not losing the historical data we have stored there. To make sure that doesn’t happen, we have a copy of everything in our Data Lake. Now, we can also make further analyses and join data with other metrics on Looker.
Make it simple
We built everything in a way that was modular and reusable (in fact, we now have four similar solutions being used throughout the company in other contexts), and we’ve scheduled it in our “Less Server” solution (from which you can read more on here).
By building our own personalized Airtable and Looker functions, which serve perfectly for our needs, we can re-use them later when working on other projects. This makes things easier for our team, giving us the opportunity to tackle new challenges instead of just solving the same problem over and over again.
Conclusion
With this new process, we have 38% more styles going active in 5 business days than before, and all product descriptions are able to be completed before the product arrives in the studio — something we were rarely able to do before. We can attribute our improving NPS (which saw a 2 point growth in 2019) to projects like this.
As a plus: Less bureaucracy, giving the team more time to focus on creative details that had been previously skipped due to the tight schedule. Since we launched this tech upgrade, the studio has been able to think about things like new props, angles, and backgrounds. It’s safe to say that our lookbook is looking better than ever.
The new process has also led the AMARO team to consider Rapid Application Development as a solution to become more agile and create value in short cycles, using tools such as Airtable, among others currently available in our CX Tech Stack.
