When you’ve got an itch to shop, everything on Amazon can look tempting. But there’s a lot more thought put into the photo presentation of those products than many people might think, especially when you’re looking for home and lifestyle goodies. The Amazon Home team is responsible for making everything from furniture to toys to consumer electronics look like they’re a slice of real life. “This is editorial,” says Jason Henrickson, a creative operations manager at Amazon Home. “We shoot in situ. If we're shooting furniture, we build a set, we rent a house, we make it look lived in and feel authentic.”
Keeping pace with an increasingly demanding photo shoot schedule was becoming impossible for Henrickson, who had no room to increase headcount beyond his core team of eight.
“At Amazon, it's pretty common to have a really big project and not be able to get the heads in fast enough to get the work done,” says Henrickson. “We had an influx of graphic design and production work that was clogging up our backlog and keeping us from doing more photography work.”
Henrickson’s art directors were being pulled off of photography projects to tackle production tasks like cropping, resizing and touching up photos, or lending a hand with the creation of banner ads to help promote products. And his solitary graphic designer was putting in 80 hour weeks to keep up with demand.
“It was slowing down our delivery schedule because we didn't have enough art directors to do the photo shoots,” says Henrickson. “We needed a skilled partner to come in and take over a lot of the production and design work, so we could focus on the photoshoots.”
To streamline production and free up his team to focus on art direction, Henrickson turned to Superside for help managing production tasks. Because Henrickson’s team fields requests from across Amazon’s many marketing and creative teams, the images they create often need to be resized or retouched to work on various places across the Amazon platform. The majority of that work, along with some graphic production tasks, like the creation of banner ads, was handled by Superside.
“Once we input our requests through Superside our dedicated project manager runs with it,” says Henrickson. “He reviews the project, comes back with questions and really does his due diligence to get into what we're looking for. Then he gets the work done.”
After the review process is wrapped, final files are delivered and the Amazon teams put them into their system to publish.
“It’s been really smooth sailing,” says Henrickson.