A men's skincare brand came to us spending £25,000 per month on content production. They had a full-time social media manager, a part-time videographer, and an agency handling their "premium" content - campaign shoots, product launches, and seasonal imagery.
Their content was beautiful. Their efficiency was terrible.
The audit
We started by mapping every piece of content they produced in a typical month. The numbers were revealing:
- 120 pieces of content created per month
- 45% were product-on-white shots with minor variations (different angles, different backgrounds)
- 20% were quote cards and text-based posts
- 15% were reformatted versions of the same content for different platforms
- Only 20% were genuinely creative - original concepts, lifestyle shoots, video content
So roughly 80% of their £25k monthly spend was going toward content that followed predictable, repeatable patterns. Content that didn't need a creative team to produce every single time.
What we changed
Automated the repeatable. Product photography for e-commerce and social follows clear rules: consistent lighting, specific angles, standard backgrounds. We set up AI-assisted workflows that generated product shots from existing 3D renders and reference images. Not for hero campaign work - for the daily feed content that was consuming most of their time.
Built a template system for text-based content. Their quote cards, ingredient spotlights, and review highlights all followed the same visual structure. We created templates that could be populated automatically from a content calendar, pulling in reviews from their Trustpilot feed and ingredient information from their product database.
Reformatting became automatic. Instead of their designer manually resizing every piece for Instagram feed, Stories, TikTok, and email, we automated the reformatting process. One piece in, four formats out.
Redirected creative energy to what matters. Their videographer and social media manager stopped spending time on repetitive production and started focusing entirely on original creative concepts, community engagement, and content strategy.
The results after 90 days
Monthly content spend dropped from £25,000 to £9,500. Content output actually increased from 120 to 180 pieces per month. But the more interesting metric was engagement: their average engagement rate rose 22%.
Why? Because the creative team was finally spending their time on creative work. The lifestyle videos got better. The community responses got faster. The content strategy got smarter - because someone was actually thinking about strategy instead of churning out product shots.
What this doesn't mean
This isn't a story about replacing creative people with AI. Their social media manager and videographer are still there, doing better work than before. The agency relationship is paused, not because agencies are bad, but because the brand now has the internal capacity to handle what the agency was doing.
The lesson is simpler than that: most beauty brands are paying creative rates for production work. Separate the two, automate the production, and your creative team can actually be creative.
Is this replicable?
Every brand's numbers will differ, but the pattern is consistent. When we audit content workflows, we typically find 60-75% of output follows repeatable patterns. The savings vary by brand size and current spend, but the principle holds: stop paying humans to do what systems can handle.