Levi’s Taiwan launches thousands of products every year. This typically breaks down into roughly 60% of the products to be launched during the 4 months of high season and the rest throughout the 8 months of low season. Launching these products used to require 1 in-house art director plus 10 off-site production artists. Since adopting our solution, Levi’s Taiwan has been able to take the entire process in-house without hiring additional designers.
In other words, Levi’s Taiwan was able to reduce its production costs by 90%. Let’s dive into the details and see how this came to be.
On average, close to 2,000 products are launched by Levi’s Taiwan every year. The 4 months of busy season typically happen during 2 months in the winter and 2 months in the summer. During these 4 very busy months, 1,200 products are launched across Levi’s brand.com, as well as all the marketplaces Levi’s products are sold across.
While some of the visuals are shared between both brand.com and the marketplaces, other visual are unique to each channel. In other words, this means each channel type has its own set of visuals, whether it be product description page images or listing images.
The volume and complexity of all this work is amplified further when we take into account the strict brand guidelines, the image cropping rules and sizing charts, all multiplied by the different products Levi’s launches. We’re talking jeans, jackets, hats, belts and even underwear.
Image adjustments & cropping
For Levi’s, a major bulk of work requires taking product photography, removing the background, making color adjustments and cropping products to be within the strict composition guides that are dictated by global brand guidelines. Even with strict guidelines and this being a very straightforward and repetitive operation, it still requires manual execution.
Sizing charts
Creating sizing charts is a common challenge for all apparel and fashion brands. Similar to cropping, this is an extremely tedious and repetitive process that requires production artists to copy numbers from a spreadsheet and paste them into a Photoshop file. This one copy-and-paste operation may need to be executed 100 times, just to complete one sizing chart, not to mention the even more tedious process of reviewing sizing charts.
File naming
Another, seemingly insignificant, feature was the ability to define a custom batch filename format. At first glance, this seems like a perfectly logical feature, since we’re looking at batch-creation of 100s of images. But in fact, this feature has implications for SEO and user browsing experience. We’ll discuss the significance of this shortly.
The Levi’s discovered our solution through one of our monthly seminars. We met, learned about their needs, introduced our solution and saw where our platform really excelled at solving Levi's challenges and where we were lacking.
Levi’s and we decided on a pilot program, during which we’d provide a managed service and at the same time develop additional features to address all of their needs.
Batch image editing & cropping
One major feature we rolled out quickly into our pilot was adding guides to branded layouts. This meant that for image cropping and color adjustment tasks, images could be uploaded and bulk-cropped and color adjusted all at once without having to review every single product image.
For any clothing brand that sells online, providing a surprise-free experience for the customer is crucial. Therefore, providing as much information about the fit as possible is essential to minimize returns and unhappy customers.
Our spreadsheet-to-image feature is perfect for creating as many sizing charts as required in an instant. This means there is no longer a need for anyone to copy numbers from a spreadsheet and paste them into a Photoshop file, thousands of times, just to make 5 sizing charts. Spreadsheets can be directly uploaded to our platform and instantly populate sizing layouts.
The third part of Levi’s automation process has to do with user experience and specifically, the order in which the images appear on their platforms. Since the order of images is determined by their filename, batch-naming files allows Levi’s to control the order of images no matter the platform they are being uploaded to. This ensures consistent branding, a consistent user experience and searchability.
Combined with our managed service the automation features discussed above have not only reduced overall costs, they have greatly improved Levi’s ability to respond to market demands without sacrificing brand experience, reduced human error rate and improved overall operational efficiency of Levi’s Taiwan.
Levi’s original team of 10 production artists and 1 art director was reduced to just 1 art director and dipp's managed service only to see great improvements in operation efficiency, time to market and reduced production costs.
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