In the cannabis space, we know that products come and go.
We understand that manually editing stock photography and/or performing monthly or quarterly photoshoots to produce great cannabis product photography can get very costly very quickly.
In the cannabis space, products come and go.
They are born as fast as they fade away.
We also know that many products, like cartridges for example, may be wildly different while looking visually exactly the same.
What can we do about this?
How do we maintain pristine, enterprise level quality while reducing cost and man-hours?
Sounds impossible, right? Wrong. Not only is it possible, but the solution is out there waiting for you.
Before we talk solutions, let’s talk problems.
Some factors to consider when identifying what makes a good product photo…
If I saw your product photo and nothing else, would I still want to buy it?
If we were selling shoes, this is a no brainer. But we’re not.
A photo of a c-cell cartridge is the same no matter what dispensary sells it.
Maybe it has a 1 color logo on it. That still tells me nothing. What is the strain-type? Indica? Hybrid? Sativa-Dominant Hybrid?
What is the strain name? Is the product branded to appeal to a certain demographic or price-point?
Problems to overcome:
- Many products are visually identical
- All of your competitors will be using the same vendor supplied assets
- Production costs can be extremely high when trying to differentiate
- Assets to create differentiated product photos simply do not exist without conducting costly photoshoots
Let's look at an example.
Go to any dispensary website. See something like this?
For the seasoned cannabis consumer this may be fine, but let’s think of it a different way.
Let’s find some analogies in other industries.
If I was out shopping for a solid whiskey for guys night and I went to any online whiskey shop would I see just just a glass of the same color whiskey, in the same exact glass for every product?
Of course not. In fact I would likely heckle it as much as I would be annoyed by it. It’s useless.
I don’t have to be a whiskey expert to pick something I think I’ll like just by the bottle.
In fact, most of the wine, beer, or whiskey I do buy, I buy because the label art speaks to me. Tell me you don’t do the same.
This is not an article about branding so let’s cut to the chase here.
Even if you have fantastic label art, how do you make your products look unique?
How do you make your products, along with third party products, all look consistent on a product listing page?
Your product listing page should look highly curated, branded, consistent, and professional all while being extremely scannable.
It should not look like the table at the flea market that sells old tools and cassette tapes.
I’m sure all of these products are actually great.
But let’s look deeper. They are all vaporizers but they are visually all over the place.
They are all facing different directions. They are all different sizes. Some have background colors. Some are just a weird bottle cap-looking logo.
One of them actually says ‘STOCK PHOTO’ beneath it.
Ok Great. Now what?
While I was Creative Director of Digital at Pocket Made, this was a challenge that constantly bothered me.
The art direction & consistency thing bothered me, but even more so was that to even come close to not being terrible in this industry took an insane amount of skilled man-hours.
We’re talking Project managers hunting down product photos from vendors that can maybe work.
We’re also talking about graphic designers and photo retouchers clipping out backgrounds, re-orienting light sources and shadows. Constant cropping and saving resulting in massively large image folders that needed to be backed up somewhere.
All of a sudden, being not visually terrible became the hungriest mouth to feed that devoured all of my resources.
This is no way to be profitable.
One late night, while frustrated and pacing menacingly, an idea came to me.
What if I could automate this?Where there’s a will there’s a way, right?
Of course there is.
What if I could somehow preset 3D assets to include options and parameters that were then dynamically read by the CMS to auto-generate beautiful, photorealistic product images that hit on all the aforementioned points?
In that moment, I saw a light at the end of the tunnel.
And thus, PocketPic was born.
We needed to cut out the middle-man in product photo generation.
We needed to set up a product category or product family asset set that, when a product was entered into the cms, built out the image perfectly without human intervention.
For NDA reasons, I can’t delve into exactly how this system works, but the general gist is this— we succeeded.
While I will continue to give some hit points on why this works, I do highly recommend reaching out to Pocket Made and ask about getting set up with PocketPic if this solution resonates with you in anyway.
Let’s see some PocketPic jams.
Let’s keep the example of vaporizers. Through in-depth user research and consumer interviews we identified that for not just vaporizers, but many other THC bearing inhalants, flavor was one of the biggest reasons to buy.
The top 3 reasons to buy trended to be:
- THC levels: Consumers wanted the ‘most bang for their buck’.
- Strain type: Some like indica, some like sativa, some like both but for different reasons, times of day, activities, or whatever.
- Flavor: No one likes rancid tasting cannabis. No matter what the modality or form factor it comes in.
THC values and strain-type were obviously on the product list item component, so that was an easy solve. But what about flavor profile?
Let’s look back at the whiskey example. Ask any whiskey connoisseur about their favorite bottle.
I highly doubt the ABV will be the first thing they mention, if they mention it at all.
They’ll often describe it like wine snobs. ‘Oaky notes, backed by a strong buttery finish of caramel’.
Now that sounds appetizing.
Added to cart.
A PocketPic image grid
Well that looks interesting…
Through PocketPic’s proprietary functions and tooling, the above images were not created by a human. They were auto-generated, via the CMS by bespoke AI, based on parameters the content admin input on the product when uploading it to the ERP.
Nice jargon drop, but what?
For this implementation for AYR New Jersey, we employed Dutchie+.
When you add a product to the Dutchie+ system you enter in the terpene information.
Terpenes influence the taste and flavor profile. PocketPic then pairs visual assets that represent those flavors with the terpenes set in Dutchie+ to the product.
What does this mean? It means that if a product had ten terpenes and one of those was Limonene, then Pocket Pic puts a lemon or citrus fruit with the product. If the the product contained Pinene, it got the fir branch.
This gets complex quickly, which is why PocketPic is a fantastic product.
PocketPic, using a bespoke AI logic, automatically and dynamically understood that the last X products generated had Pinene, and remember we don’t want the same thing in every product, it knew to choose the next dominant terpene to use as either the foreground or background flavor asset.
Let’s look at another example featuring packaging.
Just how the PocketPic AI engine can read terpene information, it can read any bit of product information.
Let’s take a look at some examples that use packaging.
Cool photos. Why do I care?
The thing to take-away here is that both of those images were auto-generated.
AI made them. And AI makes things perfect. Every time. Let’s look at them more closely:
- They both show the strain name. This was put on that box dynamically, based on what the content admin entered into a basic text field, and entered only in Dutchie+. No further action was needed.
- The strain name is on the box. Same as above. All dynamic.
- The 1 gram cartridge is larger than the half gram. The system reads this from the product information and creates the image accordingly.
How does this help me win?
For starters, your product images actually describe and represent the product they are claiming to be.
Secondly, you didn’t have to saw off your arm and sell a kidney to make it happen.
Third, You chose PocketPic to create your images for you, and now you feel all warm and fuzzy inside with a sense of ownership to the image created.
Proven ROI metrics:
- Less lead time for product-go-live
- Less resources wasted on image production
- Greater product consistency
- Greater dispensary legitimacy
- Greater awareness to your owned and house brands
- Happier and more productive content admins
- Literally picture-perfect product listing and product detail pages.
How do I get PocketPic?
While I am no longer with Pocket Made, I highly encourage reaching out to them regarding this. It’s an amazing tool that I truly believe in.
PocketPic was my little baby that I conceived and nurtured throughout my tenure there. It easily and dynamically creates great cannabis product photography so well that I want others to bask in its greatness.
Tell them Brian sent you.
