Magic case study · Beauty e-commerce

200,000 products. Six photos each. No studio.

One of the world's largest beauty retailers came to us with a studio bottleneck. Every AI tool they had tried failed on the same thing — so we built three Magic templates instead. Staff shoot a product on a phone, and get back a full set of spec-perfect frames at about $3 a product instead of $25.

8×
lower cost per product
$25 → $3
per product, six frames
6,600
frames delivered
200,000+
SKUs in the catalogue
Phone photos of a foundation going in, and finished product-card frames coming out

The problem

In beauty e-commerce the product card is the product. Nobody picks up the bottle; people decide from six photographs. So the retailer's shooting spec reads like engineering, not art direction: an exact frame and safe-zone, one exact background colour, a soft-but-real cast shadow, light that holds the true finish, strict orientation, six frames per product. Every new SKU meant studio time — and a physical studio in every new market is slow and costly to stand up.

Why off-the-shelf AI didn't work

They had tested the available AI image tools. All failed on one requirement: the typography on the packaging has to survive untouched. Generative models rewrite text into plausible nonsense. On a bottle that carries the brand name, the shade number and the volume, that is not a stylistic slip — it is a defective product card.

Macro shot of a foundation pump with the packaging text fully legible
Straight out of the template: packaging text intact, the pump facing right — exactly as the spec requires.

What we built at Magic

Three templates for the retailer's own e-commerce team — one each for concealers, foundations and lipsticks. Shoot the product on an ordinary phone, drop it into the template, get back a spec-compliant set. It is a tool inside their process, not an outsourced service: the team keeps the workflow, the studio simply leaves it. The templates even generate the model shots, holding one consistent face across thousands of cards.

Schematic of the node pipeline behind one template
Behind a single template: 40+ nodes, our own image-analysis steps and several generative models crossed in one graph, built in Magic's node editor.

The numbers

The unit is a product, not a frame. A full six-frame product — studio, photographer, retouching, management — cost about $25. With Magic it is about $3: 8× cheaper. On a single package of 6,600 frames that is roughly $24,000 saved, against an in-house process that was already efficient. And it scales past any studio schedule — a template deploys wherever there is stock and a phone, so a new market no longer needs a new studio.

If this is your problem too

Run a large catalogue against a strict content spec — marketplace, retailer or brand? We build the templates to your guidelines, your team runs them, and the cost of a product shoot drops by roughly an order of magnitude.

Talk to Magic

Client name withheld at the client's request. Figures supplied by the client's e-commerce production team.

← Home About Consulting