AI Catalog Production — House of Spice
Client
House of Spice, a Delhi-based retail chain stocking 2,000+ grocery and spice SKUs across 150+ stores.
Problem
Every season change meant a new promotional catalog — and every catalog meant a photo shoot. With thousands of SKUs, the photography queue stretched for weeks, seasonal campaigns missed their launch windows, and the creative team spent most of its time on repetitive retouching instead of campaign design. The catalog pipeline was the bottleneck between merchandising and the stores.
Solution
Gravitas India built an AI-assisted catalog production pipeline. Product photography was replaced with a hybrid model: studio-grade images generated for new and low-stock SKUs, existing photography enhanced with AI retouching, and all assets standardised to a consistent pack-shot style across the entire catalog — so the chain could publish seasonal catalogs in days, not weeks, without a photographer on call.
Implementation / Technical Approach
- Hybrid asset pipeline — AI generation for SKUs with no usable photography, AI retouching for existing shots, with a human art-director review gate before anything entered the catalog.
- Style consistency model — generation prompts and reference images tuned so every pack shot shared identical lighting, angle, and background — no jarring mix of photo and synthetic assets.
- Batch processing at scale — retouching and standardisation ran as a batch pipeline over the full 2,000+ SKU library, with per-image quality checks flagging anomalies for manual review.
- Output discipline — final assets delivered in the print and web specifications the chain's vendors already required, so downstream workflows were untouched.
- Iterative tuning — a feedback loop from the art-director review improved generation parameters monthly, steadily raising the acceptance rate of first-pass assets.
Technology
AI Image Generation Automated Retouching Batch Processing Style Transfer
Outcomes
Catalog production time fell from weeks to days — seasonal campaigns launched on schedule for the first time in three seasons. Per-SKU asset cost dropped 74%, and the full catalog achieved 100% SKU coverage at launch, with every pack shot visually consistent across the chain's print and digital channels. The creative team's time shifted from retouching to campaign design, which is where it belonged.