Introduction
"Crop.photo is an essential part of our eCommerce fashion marketplace workflow. With over 3000 on-model product images to bulk crop each month, we rely on Crop.photo to enable our wholesale team to quickly publish new products on popular online marketplaces such as Macy’s, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdales. By increasing our retouching team's productivity by over 70%, Crop.photo has been a game changer for us. Bulk crop images used to take days can now be done in a matter of seconds!"
The Challenge
An increasing number of retailers are turning to online platforms to amplify their sales and extend their brand presence. This shift necessitates compliance with the detailed image criteria established by major third-party platforms such as Macy's, Bloomingdales and Nordstrom. With over 10+ marketplaces to cater to, the sheer volume of image edits & crops for the brand becomes a significant factor.
The magnitude of images for the brand demanded an efficient solution for image retouching, a challenge in the face of the sheer volume and quick turn-around times for constant parade of sale events.
Achieving consistent image presentation and adhering to unique standards for various online platforms posed continual hurdles. While one marketplace might require an on-model image with a 1:1 aspect ratio, another could demand a 2:3 proportion. Despite these varying requirements, there's an imperative for a steadfast, uniform process to handle the daily influx of new images.
Advertising images received from photo studios often feature models, but on-model photo guidelines, licensing and digital rights restrictions require our creative operations to crop these images and obscure the models' faces before posting them online.
Johnny Vu, Creative Operations Director
Keep reading to learn how with Crop.photo, their wholesale team was able to streamline their image cropping process and significantly reduce the time and cost associated with manual retouching!
About Company
As of 2023, with over $4B in revenues, they were one of the largest fashion retailers in the world. Their eCommerce fashion marketplace workflow includes over 4000 on-model product images to crop each month, which are then published on popular online marketplaces such as Macy’s, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdales.
The Solution
Crop.photo, a cloud-based service, allowed the customer to seamlessly integrate the tool into their daily retouching workflows without any need for deployment or onboarding.
The user-friendly interface made it possible for retouchers to begin using the automation templates within minutes of signing up, eliminating the need for enterprise account management or project managers.
This was a significant departure from the customer's previous experience with retouching firms, which required legal contracts, agreements, and offshore manual retouchers. With Crop.photo, retouchers in different wholesale teams could set up automation templates specific to their eCommerce marketplaces without any prior training!
For example, the retouching team working on a Macy's collection set up a configuration to crop between the nose and eyes to ensure that the product, such as lipstick, remained visible on the model's face:
Using the complimentary sample images in Crop.photo UI, their retouchers were quickly able to preview how the headless crops would come out without even uploading their images. They could adjust the markers to create the perfect template that would eventually be re-used and applied to daily image batches.
These configurations helped train Crop.photo's AI engine to automate the cropping process. Besides face markers to crop from the automation template included other retouching rules as depicted below:
The retouching team required product images with a white background for uploading to fashion eCommerce marketplaces like Macy's. In the automation template, they selected the "remove background" option and choose white as the replacement color.
To accommodate the specific aspect ratios and output image sizes required by each marketplace, the team decided to use Crop.photo instead of relying on external tools like Photoshop. By adding custom sizes to Crop.photo's output options, they were able to automate the resizing process for all marketplace mandated sizes. Crop.photo even attached the output image size to the filename, making it easy for the retouching team to select the correct sizes before uploading to each marketplace. With Crop.photo, the team no longer has to worry about errors or spend hours manually resizing images in Photoshop.
With Crop.photo's automation feature, the team can effortlessly crop a new batch of images every day. By simply uploading the images to Crop.photo, the tool delivers high-resolution crops quickly and efficiently. The team can conveniently preview the results of their automations from the project dashboard and download individual images or a zip file directly from the cloud.
Benefits
- Accelerated Cropping Workflows: Crop.photo has reduced the time required for wholesale retouching workflows by 2X, reducing the time required from a day to mere minutes.
- Increased Productivity: Retouchers have reported an increase in their daily productivity by 70% on average since the implementation of Crop.photo.
- Consistent Resizing: Crop.photo guarantees consistent resizing, ensuring that every crop meets the predetermined aspect ratio, image height, width, and resolution requirements for the 10+ marketplaces they wholesale into.
As a result, the customer is able to send over 3000 error-free images to each of their 10 marketplaces, including Macy's, meeting the image guidelines without the need for any manual retouching.
Results
The success of Crop.photo has enabled the customer to publish new products quickly on popular online marketplaces such as Macy’s, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdales, resulting in improved customer engagement and increased revenues. Crop.photo has proven to be a game-changer for the customer, enabling them to streamline their retouching workflows, save time and costs, and improve productivity and quality control.
Overall, Crop.photo is an essential tool for any eCommerce fashion marketplace workflow that requires cropping and resizing of on-model product images. Its automation capabilities, user-friendly interface, and guaranteed consistency in resizing have made it a valuable asset for this top 10 retailer's wholesale team, and it can undoubtedly do the same for other businesses as well.
