Challenge

Creative Consistency

The bigger your content studio, the higher chance that creative consistency becomes an issue. Ensuring that every team, brand, and studio follow the correct guidelines perfectly is almost impossible. With Creative Force, we aim to simplify every step of the workflow through delivery.

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Common Obstacles

What's the problem (and our solution)?

Keeping style guides up to date

If each team, studio, or brand has its own style guide, the opportunities to make mistakes are endless. From outdated files to late emails and missed messages, it’s difficult to make sure that everyone is using the most up-to-date information at all times.

Our Solution: Synchronized style guides

Creative Force style guides are displayed to your team exactly when they need them. Style guides are digital and integrated into the platform, meaning they are always up-to-date for the current project. The minute your team changes a style guide, everyone worldwide can be informed at once, from any location.

Color consistency across images and video

Imagine a shopper looking at a blue product on your website, but they’re seeing different shades of blue across model images, mannequin images, and videos for that single product. This inconsistency can lead to shoppers not purchasing or returning items after they receive them.

Our Solution: Color reference logic

Creative Force uses color references to keep a perfect color balance between production types. For example, you can lock a color reference on mannequin production, and ensure that any on-model shots move into post-production at the same time, with the same color (locking the color reference to both).

Incorrectly executed retouching

Post-production processes vary from studio to studio. Questions arise after every shoot: Will post-production be handled internally or externally? What are the naming conventions? Where should they be uploaded or emailed? How many files should be sent at a time? All of this uncertainty allows for mistakes to be made and files to be lost.

Our Solution: Smart automation

Upon capture, Creative Force links retouching notes to tasks and ties them all directly to the style guides. This ensures your brand vision is executed as efficiently as possible, to your standards, with little room for error.

Unorganized review and approval processes

When teams don’t know who to send things to, where to send them, or how (email, FTP, hard drive, in batches, etc.) to send them, the review and approval process can slow down the entire production process.

Our Solution: Integrated Review & Approval

With Creative Force, you can create flexible approval processes and give detailed instructions for post-production – in context, in the cloud. With role-based access control, you can even invite external clients to approve selects during the creative process, from anywhere and in real-time.

Understanding creative edits

Often images are sent to retouchers, edited, and sent back to teams for approval. If there are any misunderstandings, lack of communication, or simply incorrectly executed edits, the entire process could be slowed down by searching out original files or reverting to the previous version.

Our Solution: Complete version history

All versions and production steps are right at your fingertips in Creative Force. With version history and side-by-side comparisons, you can evaluate each production step and improve your team and your process. Being able to quickly fix issues in the flow has never been easier.

A closer look

Maintaining Creative Consistency

In creative production, quicker approval processes and market releases are the new norms. This requires the smart use of review and collaboration tools, which are game-changers as they significantly reduce rejection rates, saving valuable time and resources.

Interactive Reviews for Efficient Collaboration

Creative Force provides an intuitive and comprehensive platform for collaborative review at scale. This platform fosters a dynamic environment with visual mark-ups, instructions, and ratings, enabling a quicker review process.

With rule-based logic, reminders, version control, and team transparency, the platform streamlines the review rounds for both internal and external post-production. It further optimizes the process by automatically routing rejections to the appropriate team members, never slowing down the forward movement.

Cloud-Based Collaboration for Maximum Efficiency

Navigating through cluttered PDFs, marked-up prints, never-ending email chains, and spreadsheet instructions is a thing of the past. Creative Force offers an innovative cloud-based solution.

This enables you to create flexible approval processes using intuitive Kanban views while also providing detailed post-production instructions, in context, in the cloud.

With features such as role-based access control, even external clients can participate in approving selections during the creative process. And the best part? This can be done from anywhere, in real time.

Streamlined Review Rounds for Optimal Decision-Making

Supporting the fluid decision-making process in creative production, Creative Force offers a feature for conducting multiple review rounds within the same production step. This means that the right stakeholders, at the right time, automatically receive review reminders, and ensure the production keeps moving without any bottlenecks.

Comprehensive Version History for Improved Process Evaluation

Creative Force provides access to all versions, all production steps, and a feature for side-by-side comparisons, allowing for evaluation and improvements at every production step. The platform also only involves team members when needed and supplies them with the necessary resources for informed decision-making.

This is achieved by allowing multiple review rounds in a single production step, automated progression through the workflow, assignment of one or multiple users to each round, and tailored approval logic to match your organization’s structure.

Specialized Features for Specialized Teams

Creative Force provides specific features for on-set image selection, instructions, and transfer. The app integrates with Capture One and is compatible with any capture software you already use, dictating the exact requirements and workflow.

For post-production needs, the platform offers a specialized tool for retouchers that is directly embedded as a panel in Photoshop. This tool automatically displays formatting requirements, style guide references, and detailed instructions alongside the images your post-production team is working on. Once completed, your images are automatically moved to the next step in your workflow.

Feature Focus

Streamlining Selects, QC, and Approvals

Creative Force’s streamlined process could significantly enhance your studio's operations by enabling the inclusion of essential stakeholders during image selection.

It also allows contextual visual feedback to be added for your retouch teams, as well as the approval of final assets.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Creative Force, and how does it work?

Creative Force is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that helps brands and retailers accelerate their eCommerce creative content production. It simplifies the process of planning and producing eCommerce content, improves cross-team collaboration, and ensures more transparency across every stage of production. With Creative Force, companies always deliver the highest-quality content on time and on budget.

Built on “flow production” principles, our platform utilizes intelligent automation to streamline workflows, resulting in consistent and repeatable processes. Creative Force also integrates seamlessly with existing systems, like Capture One and Adobe Creative Cloud, and features an intuitive interface.

How does flow production work?

In traditional batch production, all assets go through a single production stage before moving to the next step. This approach can lead to bottlenecks and delays.

Creative Force simplifies content production through a continuous process called "flow production." This process involves moving individual assets through various production stages as soon as they are ready, resulting in an efficient and scalable content production workflow.

Who can use Creative Force?

Creative Force is for brands, retailers, and commercial studios with in-house or external teams that produce and manage eCommerce content, such as photography, video, and copywriting.

Creative Force provides intelligent workflow automation, enhanced production visibility, and a range of collaboration tools that benefit all teams, including studio intake, styling, capture, post-production, marketing, and more. By choosing Creative Force, you can scale your content production, gain better operational visibility, and speed up time-to-market.

Does Creative Force integrate with my existing systems?

Yes, Creative Force is designed to seamlessly integrate with your existing tech stack. We have industry-leading integrations with Capture One, Adobe Creative Cloud, and more.

The platform’s API-first architecture enables our customers to seamlessly connect with Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems, Product Information Management (PIM) systems, cloud storage platforms, and any other required destinations.

Creative Force also makes it simple to work with external post-production vendors via FTP or API integrations.

Finally, our VPI Management extension makes it simple to work with product vendors to request, receive, and manage vendor-provided images (VPI).

What kind of support can I expect?

We understand that implementing a new system can be challenging, but our team is here to make the process as seamless and stress-free as possible. Our onboarding team will work closely with your team to set up Creative Force and empower your future success.

After onboarding, your Customer Success Manager will check in regularly. Our customer support team is also available 24/5 to help you with any product questions or concerns. In addition, we offer self-paced learning resources such as academy courses, help center documentation, and other materials to help you along your Creative Force journey.

In addition to providing best-in-class customer support, we continuously update our platform with new features and improvements. Our biweekly releases can be easily installed without interrupting your work.