City Beauty sells cosmetics and skincare, and launches the same product in a lot of colors: lip gloss, lipstick, lip liner. Every shade has to show up on e-commerce, in email, on social and in retail, and a packaging redesign is currently rolling out across the site.

The design team that feeds all of it is four people. Ashley Espinoza, Director of Product & Design, oversees creative direction across digital, retail, packaging and product, and leads the team. Emma Chisholm, senior graphic designer, has been there six years and runs the day-to-day photography, creative and graphic requests. Two designers work under them.

For most of that history there was no staff photographer, and the work got built out of whatever images already existed. "Instead of us asking, like, what’s the actual best way to create the asset, we kind of automatically default to whatever image already exists," Ashley says. "We would have to work around that." Changing that is most of her job. "A big part of my role is looking how we can evolve our creative process, whether that’s establishing new systems, improving workflows, or finding different tools that allow for a lot more flexibility."

"The photographer left"

When Ashley arrived there was no photographer at all. It was her and her boss, a senior graphic designer at the time, shooting plain e-commerce photos on white and on gray. "That was the only asset that we had to work with," Ashley says. "And it was just us basically having to Photoshop around that, and be creative with creating assets."

Eventually they hired a photographer. Then the photographer left, and the team had to choose between hiring another one and moving to 3D rendering. They went with 3D, and the reason had less to do with rendering than with timing. Sales and promos at City Beauty change after the shoot, not before it. A product gets pulled from a promo late and a morning of lighting is suddenly worthless. "We would shoot something, and then they’d be like, actually, never mind, we don’t want this product in the promo anymore," one of them recalls, "which would result in us having to either reshoot, or have to Photoshop that product out."

3D fixed the scheduling and added a wait of its own. Every asset now needed a model built first. "There was just some things that we didn’t like about it."

"Another production path"

Two things made FLORA stick. The first was speed. "The speed has been very important for our team," Ashley says. "We’re a very small team. We wear a lot of hats."

The second was what it starts from. FLORA works off what they already have instead of something they have to commission first. "We could literally shoot a product with our iPhone and just put it in there, and then start to create what we want to create." No model to build, no photographer to book.

Ashley is careful about what that does and doesn’t mean. "It’s not to say that FLORA replaced them," she says. "It’s just like another production path that we use to be able to create that work."

"Three to five hours is now taking us a couple of minutes"

The day-to-day work is repetitive. One base image becomes the shade variants for the site and for lifestyle. An email campaign calls for six specific products, one turns out to be discontinued and another out of stock, so those get swapped rather than reshot. Backgrounds and colors on existing images get changed with inpainting. Complex scenes get composited in the layer editor.

"Something that would normally take us three to five hours is now taking us a couple of minutes for it to generate," Emma says. "And if it doesn’t generate correctly on the first try, we can just reprompt."

The bigger saving came from packaging. A new launch means deciding what the packaging should look like across components and colors, and the old way to find out was to send artwork to the vendor, wait for a physical sample, refine, repeat. Now they mock it up and ask. "Instead of us having to send over the artwork and having them produce an actual sample, you can just skip that step and be like, hey, can you do this? And then they’d be like, yes, right now," Ashley says. "That piece especially has saved us at least six months of production time on a few of our products now."

"We still shoot in-house quite a bit"

Photography did not go away. "We don’t want it to replace photography completely," Emma says. "We still shoot in-house quite a bit." The team is prepping two in-office shoots right now, and FLORA’s role there comes before the shoot: generating directions they hadn’t seen before, so they can go recreate them in office.

Photoshop didn’t go away either. "Usually we still need to Photoshop a little bit." Scenes with six or more products still give the models trouble, which is why the layer editor matters. Emma composites the scene the way she’s framing it mentally, and keeps a transparent-background version so that if the AI alters the text on a bottle, there’s something clean to fix by hand.

"It kind of forces you to be more specific"

The change Ashley didn’t expect was in how she gives creative direction. She describes herself as someone who can be vague, with a clear picture in her head and a harder time getting it into someone else’s. Prompting turned out to be practice for that. "It kind of forces you to be more specific," she says. Lighting, environment, finish: things she used to hold as instinct now have to be said out loud, and that carries past the canvas into how she briefs her own designers. "Trying to actually voice it to someone is a little bit different than what it is in my head."

Asked what she’s proudest of, and told it didn’t have to be about FLORA at all, she didn’t reach for a project.

"I really am proud of our team’s ability to create and problem solve, especially with the limited resources that we have," Ashley says. "We don’t say, like, no, we can’t do this. We just make it work, and we make it look very beautiful."