Automated AI-Driven Design Pipeline in E-Commerce

Founded in 2019, Crown & Paw is an e-commerce platform specializing in the design and print of high-quality custom pet portraits and products. Crown & Paw's products are heartwarming and have delighted thousands of happy pet owners and customers. However, the process to design high-quality products that satisfy their customers is complex, involving interaction between different systems, stakeholders and a repetitive, time-consuming, and human-driven design pipeline.

Crown & Paw engaged Brainpool to build an AI-powered design pipeline to automate tasks that would resolve key challenges, such as:

• Improve design speed and reduce turnaround to deliver products to customers faster.
• Accommodate demand: during peak periods, organic demand was so high that Crown & Paw had to restrict marketing activities.
• Overcome the linear cost of scaling services to customers: more customers mean employing more freelance designers, presenting a significant cost and barrier to growth.
• New product and commercialization opportunities: adapt the IP to create new products such as shirts and jumpers or offer a solution to similar problems in other industries to generate new revenue streams.

After exploring the business priorities and evaluating opportunities that would result in the most business value, Brainpool developed an AI application able to automate the most complex and time-consuming stages of the design pipeline:

• Step 1: crop the head of the pet in the photo
• Step 2: paste and correctly position in relation to the chosen template
• Step 3: apply the signature Crown & Paw ‘oil’ smudge effect to seamlessly blend the two images to create the finished product.

Each of these components presented a distinct challenge requiring a specific AI methodology to be used:

1. Computer vision face detection: identifying the face of the pet within the photo, which is then bound and cropped, ensuring all the pets’ facial features are included.
2. ML pipeline built for positioning and orientation of the cropped image relative to the template.
3. GANs powered style transfer to apply the Crown & Paw signature oil effect to produce the finished product.

Thanks to the AI pipeline developed by Brainpool the Client was able to successfully automate the design process for a variety of dog breeds to a consistently high standard.

Adam Reed, Founder and CEO of Crown & Paw, was unequivocal in the impact that this innovation would have on Crown & Paw not only from a quality, process and bottom-line perspective, estimating that this technology once deployed could generate millions of pounds in revenue.

Key Benefits:

• 20 minutes Time saving per design
• 200% Reduction in order processing time
• $365,000 Savings per year in overheads on contractors and suppliers

“Every year for the past 3 years we have had to halt our marketing in the run up to Christmas due to huge backlogs. This has led to missed revenues in the multiple six figures every year. This tool should be able to give us at least a few extra days trading toward Christmas as well as reduce the production costs throughout the rest of the year.” - Adam Reed, Crown & Paw CEO & Founder