From Phone Photo to Full Content Kit: How Shopify Brands Are Using AI Product Photography and Video

Speaker A: Hey there. Just before we jump into today's episode, I want to flag something that I know is pulling money out of your business right now. And most of you don't even see it happening. Like, you optimize for cac, for conversions, for retention. But there literally is a leak at the very bottom of the funnel that most founders and marketers aren't watching, and that's chargebacks. And so here's how it gets you. You win a customer, you ship the product, everybody's happy. Well, at least it seems that way. And then, I don't know, three or four months later, a dispute comes through. Uh, the bank claws money back out of your account and, and then they even tack a fee on. And you usually find out when you're kind of reconciling your numbers and something is just a little bit off. And like, for a brand that's doing a few million dollars a year, that really adds up to like 1 to 2% of your total revenue. Like literally poof, gone. And most operators just eat it. Like it's a cost, uh, of doing business. You know, I've even fought disputes manually. And to be honest with you, like, it's literally a full time nightmare. And that's exactly what Charge Flow fixes. Like two click Shopify install and their AI builds and submits the evidence on every single dispute for you. And here's the kicker. You only pay when they win money back for you. So no recovery, no fee. Like the downside literally is zero. So if you've been ignoring chargebacks, go find out what it's been costing you. You can head on over to e commercefastlane.com charge flow and you can connect your store. Couple minutes and you'll see for yourself. Link's also going to be in the show notes. So. All right, let's jump into today's episode. All right, well, welcome back to E Commerce Fast Lane. I'm your host. Now today's conversation is going to be all about product content. Like, you know, the photos and videos really that I guess power, like every product page that you publish on your Shopify store. And so you know, if you're, if your catalog is starting to outgrow maybe faster than your ability to shoot it. And this happens a lot. Just think seasonality, especially with fashion. Like, I mean, gosh, I've even just seen back to school stuff and I'm just thinking, I'm just getting into summer right now, but I'm seeing back to school offers and things and thinking, wow, these people are like, because I don't have a brand myself currently but it's. I find it very interesting that people really have to be forward thinking like literally in quarters. I mean gosh, it's in. We're in July right now. Is this recording? We're already in Q3 and so people are already thinking about back to school and they're thinking about. Some people are thinking about BFCM offers and getting these production in order or the fall lineups. It's so interesting. My guest today, um, and their company has solved a lot of this kind of production problems that a lot of brands are coming uh with. His name is Sam Thomas Davies. He's uh, the head of content at a company called Dream and their D R E E M Now Dream, what they are is they're a merchant facing kind of product from uh, a larger company called Creative Force which we're going to talk about in a few minutes. And it looks like that is a more of a production platform really behind a lot of the enterprise E commerce Studios and uh, which turns, from what I understand it turns a single product photo from. You can take it on your phone literally and it actually can produce like full content kit where you know uh, pack shots and on model imagery, lifestyle scenes and videos like it's pretty amazing. Um, and no studio and no extra shoots required. It's really an interesting solution. And so my hope today we're going to kind of unpack I guess the economics around AI generated product content. So I think that's the key here, trying to understand traditional photography, uh, which is, you know there's a lot of like tutorials out there about how to DIY your own photography and then see about the cost savings now, um, potentially about having a tool like Dream take care of all that for you. So hey Sam, welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Thank you very much Steve. Very happy to be here.

Speaker A: Uh, this is great. So before we kind of jump into the dream product right now, um, can you set the stage a little bit about the Creative Force company and who are the brands that you're working with on an enterprise level. I just want to understand kind of what that company is and how it's assisting these Fortune 500 companies. Um, once we set that stage, I want to talk about the offshoot now with the Dream product.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I think before we talk about Dream, we need to go back and talk a little bit about the problem Creative Force solved a few years ago and continues to solve today. So a lot of high volume retailers like Calvin Klein, Columbia San Mar, a lot of these really big retailers that you would have heard of, they have a lot of frustrations around creating content at scale. Oftentimes they are working in fragmented tools. They have a lot of internal communication across multiple tools. There are multiple, uh, steps. And as you can imagine, it becomes a very complex operation over time. And so what Creative Force does is it's a software as a service for enterprise brands that allow them to manage their workflows end to end within one platform. They're able to integrate with all the other tools like Capture One. And this is probably a good segue into how we got started with Dream, because, yeah, in the last 12 months or so, obviously there's been a lot with AI development and a lot of companies have been trying to figure out from a positioning perspective how to factor that into their companies as well. And we've really seen in the last six months a lot of the big customers that we have coming to us and saying leadership has come to us and said we need AI. We don't know what that means. We've put together some small teams at the company to try and figure this out. And it's a very broad term and it's hopefully something that we can get into a little bit in this episode. But it can mean many different things for many different companies. And so we've had Dream on the back burner. Originally it was kind of our research and development tool and we were experimenting with AI, simple things like color changer, uh, putting an image on a model, very rudimentary image to video. And we started to take it very seriously in the last six months and we started to allocate more resources to it. And we're now at a point where, like you said in your introduction, there are so many things that you can do. And one of the things that you can do is imagine if you can capture an image of a product on your phone, maybe it's even a sample in the warehouse before it's shipped to your distribution center. And you are able to turn that into image into what we call a content kit. It is multiple pieces of content for a campaign. It's a front and back on model shot. It's a product shot or pack shot. It's image to video. And we've really iterated a lot on that over the past couple of months to a point where you can create your own talent, you can think about scale in terms of we just launched our mtp, so you can actually talk to Dream via Claude and you're really able to integrate Dream into different tools. Shopify on the SMB side as well. And so it's a really exciting time for the company and hopefully we can dig a little bit more into Dream on this call.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's amazing. You know, it's funny, you talk about these, uh, frontier models. I follow a lot of different, um, influential people in this space. Um, I'm in the media company side, so I'm more in the content production and, and things like that. Um, but these frontier models, um, just the intelligence level that's available now and companies like what, you know, what you guys are doing with Dream right now and creating this harness and trying to understand, well, how do we use the intelligence and the power of these models, but very specifically tailored towards E commerce businesses and what their use cases are. I mean, you could say, oh, okay, why can't I just upload a photo like myself in cloud or cloud design or. And then just have it kind of run and do its thing? It doesn't actually work like that. There's a lot of underlying technology and, um, which is the harness in the background that sits on top of these models that really allow all of this magic to happen. And I think that's the kind of uniqueness of the problem that you guys are solving. So let's talk a bit about what happens. Let's say, um, you know, like, I mean, you brought the hoodie example, but, you know, someone has a phone, a phone photo, they took one themselves of a hoodie. What happens between uploading that photo, what's happening in the background and then what's then given to the marketer or, you know, someone on the, on the brand side.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I think to your earlier point, before you ask that question, there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes and I feel like that is a very strong competitive advantage we have because we're completely transparent. A lot of the models that we're using, and when I use the term models, I'm differentiating it from talent. So the AI models like Nano, Banana 2 and Cling 2.5, we are using these models and you can see them visibly in the tool, but there is a lot going on in the background. We actually just launched a new chart and our chat is able to identify, based on the image that you upload, whether it is for male or female. We're actually looking a lot right now into aesthetics and fit and fidelity. And we get a lot of questions around, well, how does the AI model know about texture, M and drape and things like that? And so that's something that we're looking a lot into. So to your point or to your question rather, what happens is when you upload this image or if you're pulling this image from another source like Shopify, you are going through these multiple steps. You're able to choose a talent and like I mentioned earlier, you're able to upload your own talent if that's something that you wish to do. You can either have a digital twin if you have consent from a talent that you like using. And that's something we should talk about later as well is this is not a binary box that you put yourself in. You're either using Gen AI content or you're not. There's actually, it's actually more of a spectrum and how much of it that you're using. And so we can come back to that later. But I think with regards to what is actually happening, the human in the loop part is very important and that's something that we believe in. We think it's something that is important. I know we see a lot on LinkedIn and other places around people scaling their content production and sometimes it feels like you're behind because you see this super advanced workflow that someone has built in Nan and they're pushing different tools to different places and so on. But it's really important to have that human in the loop. And so just like you would ordinarily, you want to be hands on with choosing a talent, maybe like an art director, you want to have control over uh, how you're building an outfit for a particular look, maybe how you are ah, selecting poses for the model. And oftentimes and this is something that we are looking into now as well is you have these style guides, you have these very specific looks that you need to adhere to. And so we want to have you, the human in the loop so you're able to have that input every step of the way so that the output is something that you're not only happy with but you can put your stamp on and confidently have on your website or whatever channels you're using.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's amazing when I think about it, um, when choosing a talent I think about like a lot of brands have m like brand guidelines um, and style guides and things because they, they're trying to and are differentiating themselves to their competitors in the marketplace and it's just like, well and they know what their ICP is, their ideal customer profile, they understand uh, hence you know, why they're moving along in their journey. Having all this information was so interesting. If you could Actually, um, put that information from within Dream and saying, hey, just so you know, these are our brand guidelines. Here's some style guides, here's some, uh, live photography that we've taken in the past that kind of got us to where we're at today. But we're looking to expand upon that. And so it's interesting. I just. I love getting the human in the loop because I think that's all about taste and proper art direction. But then being able to use the tool to make some choices based on, you know, some frameworks.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is something that a lot of people are overlooking. We had a webinar recently, and we made a very strong point around this is not replacing anyone. I think there is a, uh, danger sometimes of thinking, okay, no photo shoot or no models or no talent. That's really more on the SMB side. If you can't afford that, you now have this advantage where you can compete with bigger companies because you can use a tool like DREAM to take video, for example. I spoke to one small business owner a few months ago, and they were saying, it is so costly for me to shoot video, but I can now do it with Dream because I already have my own model shots. And I think that is something that a lot of brands are really starting to dip their toe into now when it comes to Genai content. You can take all these existing assets that you have that you spent years shooting, and you can just start to experiment with turning it into video. Or maybe if you have the models consent, you can actually start to experiment with different looks. You're not needing to reshoot for different seasons and things like that. And so I hope it's something that we can dig more into on this call. But I just see there is so much opportunity with Gen content, and not even generic content, actually. AI in general in creative operations, there's so many different things that you can do. And I don't think we've even begun to scratch the surface.

Speaker A: Yeah, you think about it like, just a year ago, uh, you know, we always wonder, like, you know, is the quality going to hold up? And the reality is, like, every, every generational model has come. These frontier models are coming out, like, literally every week. Like, what happened six months ago is ridiculous kind of what's available today? And you think, well, just the acceleration that's happening with the capabilities of these. And then, you know, what Dream is doing with their harness on top of these models and customer feedback about just wanting to expand the product and just the quality when you talk about drape and fabric and all that. It's a really interesting concepts about how do we do do that? And then you do your own experimentation. But a lot of it's built into the harness itself, hence why the product is so good. I've watched some of the videos that are produced by Dream and some of the videos, some of the case studies you've done, it's just, it's, it's, it's absolutely unbelievable how great it is, uh, at scale. So it's pretty cool.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's, I think you touch on an important point about getting that feedback because in the beginning when we were in private beta, we were showing it to people and what was quite surprising was, was the reaction was always, yeah, the generation looks good, but what about this? And oftentimes they would raise things like, well, how does the model know such and such, how does the model know about the drape? Or how am I able to ensure consistency across hundreds, if not thousands of views? And so I think a, uh, good learning for us was warts and all. Don't be afraid to show your product and actually don't be embarrassed. Sometimes we would do webinars and the generations would fail live on the, the recording, but it didn't really matter because we just showed that this is possible and this is something that we're thinking about and we're only limited by where the models are at that time. I think it's really interesting, a couple of months ago, maybe even three months ago, you couldn't make a video if you didn't have a back shot because the back would change when the M model turned around. That's not longer the case. We're now at a point where you can have multiple reference shots as the model is turning and so you just, just able to add more and more detail to these outputs. And I think it's just extraordinary how fast it is accelerating now. And so if you, if you're committed to constantly never endingly improving and getting this feedback from your users, you're gonna have such a phenomenal product that's just going to blow your competitors out of the water.

Speaker A: So let's talk a little bit about the economics. It's always interesting to me because I think about when you compare kind of like AI generation is what we're talking about right now, versus maybe a traditional photo shoot, which is There are some SMBs that are listening right now. And you know, like I said at the top of the show, there's a lot of, there's a lot of webinars. There's a lot of tutorials and stuff about how, um, to do product shots. I think initially that's kind of how you use a light box and a camera and you kind of go through those motions that, um, just is what it is in the early days. Then you kind of migrate up to a little more of a professional setup. Um, and I've, I've actually been to a few. Well, one fashion brand that I helped manage when I was at Shopify, I actually a corner of their warehouse was um, set up in a shoot section because that's where they would bring in live models and um, how they would do product photography, um, because their fashion lines would change quite a bit, but they had a whole separate section in lighting and the whole thing. A lot of that has changed now. So can you talk about maybe what you see from a cost perspective of the traditional photo shoots and kind of like how things at scale now are working with Dream?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a good question, Steve. I think there are two ways to answer this, depending on whether you are SMB or enterprise. So if we start on the SMB side, sometimes we speak to companies where their models, their talent are their employees, sometimes even their children. And um, they are shooting them. If they want a lifestyle shot, they will just go into the street. And sometimes they're just taking pictures on their camera. And so for them, 10xing, their content is the ability to turn their existing product photography into video. Other times it's able to create their own talent and just be able to create more content with a tool like Dream. And so for them, traditional photography is very basic and ad hoc. On the enterprise side, if you have the opportunity, like you say, to actually go to, uh, some of the big, big companies that actually have their own commercial studio in house, you can see they're shooting, you know, they have multiple people shooting ghost mannequins. They have on model photographers, they have stylists, they have so many talent and crew on set. And as you can imagine, there are a lot of logistics involved, there is a lot of cost involved. And so I think to your question, it really depends on what is the goal of the company. Because I think one thing that's really important to mention here is, as I mentioned earlier, it isn't. You don't fall into this camp of you use Gen AI content or you don't. We have some customers that they're not quite ready to use Gen AI content sometimes. It's actually very much against, uh, the ethos as a company. But they love it for outfitting and styling because you can use the Outfit builder and Dream, and it's much more fun and interactive to do something like that than just using a pin up board or having to do something more manually. And so I think there are a lot of different use cases for tools like Dream, and it's just a case of actually finding, okay, well, what is the work that we don't enjoy doing? How can we outsource this to AI and how can we actually get more out of what we're already doing by doing something like that?

Speaker A: What I find interesting too is I, uh, imagine there's an offshoot with social ads because if you're going to be creating content through Gen AI with, you know, one photograph, one picture, and then it goes down its rabbit hole of sharing a lot of content. It's just like Imagine also sharing that with like, you know, the paid social team and saying, okay, here's a bunch of assets on the new collection. Feel, uh, free to use some of these, um, in your ads. Um, these are different people. Merchandisers on a PDP page or a collection page are likely different people physically than maybe the paid social people. I mean they do talk and work together, but I think it's a different craft in producing social ads. And so what's your thought about that? Has there been a decent workflow from content production? And it looks like it's a dual purpose of PDP and social ads?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question, Steve, and it's something that we have thought a lot about. So in, in Dream, depending on what your workflow is or what your goal is, you can actually export your assets in different dimensions, different file types. We go from 2k to 4k and, and we are looking at actually the ability to push these assets to different platforms. So as I mentioned earlier today, we have this integration with Shopify. So we've even had people that reach out and say, I love what you're doing with Dream. I don't want to be able to log in. I want to be able to create a workflow where, uh, when I publish new PDP on my Shopify page, it sends a request to Dream, it creates an asset, sends it back to Shopify, then it pushes it to my social channels. And so whatever you can imagine, we are very soon going to be able to do a lot of these things, especially now with MCP and things like that. And so the workflow aspect is really exciting. And we actually just recently in the last month we launched a, uh, connector with Creative Force. And so Creative Force does have this workflow engine where you're able to have multiple steps, push assets to different phases of production. You're able to assign them to different people. We even have people that push their assets to dreams for some things, push it back to Creative Force. And so that is going to be an option as well, is to be able to pull in those social channels. I think a lot of us have all experienced that pain. Any of us that have ever worked with paid marketing, creative is key. And oftentimes you're waiting on a designer or someone like that. And so I think the ability to just be able to do this yourself and the quality to still be there is something that's really exciting for a lot of teams.

Speaker A: Now, you did mention a bit about, uh, some brands are, I guess I'm going to use my own words here, but the crawl, walk, run kind of framework, meaning that maybe I'm not quite ready for full Gen I production because I just, you know, some people have a little bit of a pushback on it. They, you know, the. There's an acronyms about AI slop and all this craziness. Uh, and I think that's maybe on older models, um, with not the correct harnesses that you guys have set up. So when you talk about traditional, like people on a PDP page, let's say, uh, having traditional photography on there, um, and then gen AI and then potential video, that seems like a 1, 2, 3. That's a pretty good like, early punch, I would say, on a PDP page of having traditional photography as needed. And um, then using that as a reference image as far as the production of everything else. And then also having a video option that seems like, you know, at least you're giving, you know, the site visitor an option to, you know, you're stickier on the PDP page, you're clicking through the other images, you're being more engaged in what they have for sale and you're like, oh, yeah, that, that could be me. What's your thought on traditional gen AI and video?

Speaker B: Um, altogether, I think, to answer this question, Steve, I think I would look at it in terms of. We did a webinar recently on how do you get started with this? And I really think you fall into one of three buckets. The first bucket is, okay, we're open to testing this, but we want to keep it internal. So I mentioned earlier the example of outfitting, styling, feeling. Um, maybe you want to explore, you know, localization for a new market or something like that. Sometimes, I mean, we've, we've had webinars where we've spoken to people that work in creative Ops and you know, they're already using chat GPT as inspiration for different looks, different angles for campaigns and things like that. So that's like the first bucket, I think the second bucket is. And this kind of relates to what you're saying about video. Like run a small. Run a small pilot. Like what if you. And I'll use SMB as an example here, let's say that you only have product shots or pack shots on your website. Well, now you have an opportunity to put them on model because we know on model is going to convert better than product shots or pack shots. Or maybe you already have on model and you want to take some of your maybe low converting pages and you want to increase the conversion rate. So maybe you can take some of those assets and you can turn them into video. And so I think just having these hypotheses around, okay, I want to increase my conversion rate on my pdp. How might I do that? Okay, let's test on model versus video. I think there are. One of my favorite use cases actually is if you sell, um, unisex products but you only shot female or male. Well, now you have the opportunity to shoot the other. And so I think have some fun with how you actually approach this. Have a hypothesis and just test it. It's very, very easy to do. I think that third bucket is. And we're seeing this now with some really big companies. Uh, and I will say, like, just based on what we've seen, I think there's a lot going on right now or certainly will be coming out in the next month or so around these different acts that are coming out regarding transparency with Gen AI and things like that. We're actually having a lot coming out on the CF side very soon about how, uh, to make sure that you are governed to do that correctly and so on. But I think that there are some companies where they've just gone all in on AI. And I think my point here is that the, there's no wrong way of doing this, but it's just a case of finding like, who are you as a company, how do you feel about this, what is your stance? And then just running these small experiments, whether it's internal or external. And to your point, it could be actually just testing more video. That's often a very, very easy win that you can get started with.

Speaker A: I find interesting too. Uh, and this happens a lot with, um, brands that I Speak with, um, we talk about either platform creep or kind of app creep where they're just using so many different platforms and we start doing an audit of like all the different tools and things. I know people want to experiment and stuff like that. What seems to me what Dream is doing is you're creating a source of truth from a content production perspective like either image or video. And you're making it easy for the brand to be able to produce that content and have a source of truth about where it resides and what we're working on. Because versus as you said, hey, some people are, you know, getting some ideas in Chat GPT or in Claw or Gemini or whatever they're up to. What's um, your thought on that? Am I on the mark here about is that really what Dream is trying to do from uh, a content like video and image content production? Are you trying to be the source of truth for these E commerce brands?

Speaker B: I think so. And I think it is going to be very similar to what we see at Creative Force now where it's very much end to end workflow. Whether you are SMB or enterprise, we already have these multiple ins. Whether it's via Shopify or the Apple app that we have, it's the ability to push that content to the multiple platforms, whether it's social or your ESP or whatever tools that you're using and actually just interacting with the chart. As I mentioned earlier, we just launched our new V3 chart and you can actually just talk to it like any other LLM. You can even say, I have this product, I want uh, an Australian looking model. Who would you suggest from the talent library? We have 400 plus talents. Uh, if we don't have something that you're interested in, you can create a talent via a prompt. And so I really see some teams uh, being able to just work in there. Very similar to what you would experience today with Claude or ChatGPT, where you're working from one place and you're just pushing this content to the right places.

Speaker A: Amazing. So let's talk about the Shopify app. So um, if someone goes to the App Store, they type in Dream and they have it and they install it. Walk us through what's happening in the background when you connect. I'm just trying to understand the pipes between Shopify and Dream, what's actually happening and then um, how does the user use the platform? Is it from within Shopify's kind of admin or that just more of a data pipeline and you're running directly through Dream Uh, AI.

Speaker B: Yeah. So we have this two way synchronization. So when you download Shopify, sorry download Dream, you'll be able to bring all of your products into Dream. So when you are creating your assets, you'll be able to assign them to products and push them directly to your Shopify pages.

Speaker A: Ah, ah, well that's cool. So that means, so there's a one to one sync then between the two. So then, so when you're working on something that's really neat, so then, and then, um, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to um, publish them live, but at least they're, they're created and then they're saved and then you can view from within the Shopify admin the assets that are created for that particular product.

Speaker B: That's exactly right.

Speaker A: That's amazing. So what do you think some of the next steps are for? Like, because I'm always interested in the sweet spot we talk about, you know, certainly you're you know, there for the enterprise people, uh, going through creative force directly, but it seems like, you know, you're kind of going a little bit downstream now to really help these, you know, SMBs in mid market with more of a DIY solution. So can you talk about like the sweet spot of merchandise getting like, because I'm trying to get into the financial, economic part of it. Like, you know, is there value here more than just testing and experimenting? I, uh, just want to make sure that we have the right sweet spot of merchant. They say no, no, here's people that are getting the best value out of the Dream platform. Platform today.

Speaker B: Yeah. When we speak to, I think if you ask any econ brand, the one metric that they think about more than anything is time to market. How do they reduce that? How can you get that down from weeks to days, if not hours? And I really believe that a tool like Dream is able to help you do that. One problem that we are working really hard on solving right now is scale. How do you, you scale this? We've been talking a lot on this call about product shots or pack shots, video on model. But what about lifestyle? What about bringing your brand guidelines, your aesthetic into this content? What do you do when each SKU has, you know, potentially 10, 20 plus different assets and you're launching hundreds, if not thousands, if not tens of thousands of SKUs every year. And so we are looking deeply into how do you actually scale this? And not only how do you scale this, but how do you scale this and maintain that consistency. And of course this is not New to AI because even with traditional photography there is post production, there are revisions, there are humans in the loop. And so that is the big problem that we're trying to solve right now. And uh, it's something that we're very excited about and it's something that um, we do see a way to solve, especially as the models continue to get better. Um, so that's something that we were very excited about.

Speaker A: So when we talk about traditional photo shoots, because I want to go back to that, because I know that I think the crawl, walk, run kind of scenario, um, when do you think or what do you see where traditional photo shoot might currently still be the best option for a brand today? Um, and then what eventually motivates them to want to move to Gen AI production?

Speaker B: I imagine it's on the S and P side. As the business grows and you have more products, um, there is going to be a need for that. Because of course the more better content that you have for your products, then the higher the conversion rate, more sales and revenue, the opportunity to scale and so on. Um, we typically see on the SMB side companies coming to us when they simply can't afford video. For instance, they can actually put a dollar amount on how much a video costs and it is a fraction of the cost using a tool like Dream. And so I think that is something that really lights a fire under them. The ability to see how much more they can allocate to say, their marketing budget. They can now spend more time on acquiring a customer than they needed to previously with shooting, uh, or hiring a studio or something like that. And so, um, I think that's something that really unlocks a lot of opportunity on the SMB side.

Speaker A: I also think maybe, um, you know, a brand that has, you know, one or two SKUs, um, and, or maybe even expensive product, um, you know, maybe they just, it's just not in their workflow today. I mean maybe there are versions, like annual versions of this product that come out, uh, enhancements and stuff. But they're just willing to spend the money on a traditional photo shoot. It just kind of is what it is because they're only a one or two SKU kind of brand. That happens a lot in, especially in consumer electronics or certain kind of SKUs you see on Indiegogo and, and Kickstarter and things like that. A lot of times they're just going to spend the money for a traditional video and a traditional kind of photo shoot and, and that's okay. But I also think that there, there is options Back to the experimentation side of again, if you are investing and you have a one sku, let's say you're a luggage brand. You literally just have a set of luggage. That's what you sell and you're testing it out to the market. There's something unique about your luggage. Great. Go ahead and take the original photography yourself. But I still think there's opportunity in taking those pictures. And then with your phone, now with the Dream app and then seeing, seeing what comes up. I mean it seems like a no brainer to me.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think especially in fashion and apparel which is obviously what we specialize in. It's not enough to just have these very simple front and back shots depending on the, the uh, the sophistication of the product. And you want to have something that has very strong fidelity. You want to show the, that the material and the colors. You want to have those close up shots. You want to have those um, what we call detail shots. You want to have video. Um, you'll see this on a lot of luxury brands. You know, sometimes they have 10 different assets just for one SKU. And so I think that is something that maybe on the SMB side they, they can't afford or they haven't thought about or they like you say, they don't have the, the workflow, sophistication or maturity to even think in those terms. But now when it's as simple as just uploading, uh, front and back shot, detail shot, if that uh, and just creating as many different posts as you want, I think that's something that is really, really exciting. Yeah.

Speaker A: So cool. And I know we kind of chatted uh, before recording today and I just want to make sure that we're, that we're mindful of everybody's time today. And I really think it's, it's one of these tools that I really think uh, until you actually try it, you don't know what you're missing. And so um, I know you have an offer that you want to talk about with our listeners today. I'm looking at the App Store right now. The price, pricing is very affordable just even on its own. And so it's, it's certainly worth a test but I just want to throw the baton back to you and like what sort of offered and what do you believe some next steps are for those that are listening today?

Speaker B: Yeah, so Dream is free. We offer 100 monthly credits and that's more than enough for you to get started. It's credit based so different types of assets require different number of credits depending on the quality and output and so on. Um, so you can try Dream, uh, for free. But if, uh, you're listening to this podcast, we'd love to give you some, some bonus credits so that you can really test Dream out. And so if you go to Dream AI Forward slash Fastlane, uh, those will be auto applied to your account and that's Dream.

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, exactly. Well, I make sure that I'll update that, uh, in the show notes. I've written a lot of notes here today. I've learned a ton. Some of my takeaways and I'm sure those are that are listening today. Would agree that, um, human in the loop I think is key. Um, this and, and I also feel that the whole crawl, walk, run kind of scenario, that it doesn't mean all of a sudden we have to change everything. It's about experimentation. It's trying like the, these frontier models and just the fact that you can get video now and a couple, a couple shots with your phone and all of a sudden, boom, um, you have like a full roster of you just, you just don't even know. When I look at some of your case, ah, studies, this is phenomenal. The quality of kind of what's coming out and I know it continues to iterate and improve. And um, I just wanted to thank you, Sam, for coming on the show today and sharing. I really think, you know, clearly you're building something that's very impactful for brands and I think they need to try it, uh, you know, so Dream AI forward slash Fastlane. It'll be in the show notes. Thanks. Thanks for coming on, uh, any kind of parting words for those that are listening.

Speaker B: I think, um, just think bigger in terms of, of uh, what you have today and know that uh, it is within your reach. Uh, you can try a tool like Dream and you will see how easy it is to get a more better content for all your channels and for all your products. And uh, yeah, uh, thank you for listening.

Speaker A: Oh my m. Pleasure. All right, well, have yourself a great afternoon. Well, that's it for today's episode. I'd like to thank you personally for being a loyal listener of E Commerce Fastlane. It's my hope that this podcast is offering you a ton of value through growth strategies, tactics and exclusive insider tips on the best Shopify apps and marketing platforms, all with my personal goal to help you build, manage, grow and scale a, uh, successful and thriving company powered by Shopify. Thanks for investing some time today and listening to the show. I'm so proud and excited that you have a growth mindset and are a constant learner. I truly, truly appreciate you and your entrepreneurial journey. Enjoy the rest of the week and keep thriving with Shopify.