Case Study
Growing through Integration
How managing 100,000 product photographs
helped a small jewelry company
quadruple their business
Line of Business Applications
www.matterform.com
info@matterform.com
505.750.3531
©2013 Matterform Media Inc
Matterform Media: Line of Business Applications for the Small Enterprise
Matterform Media provides Line of Business integration and development for the small
enterprise. We help small businesses work like big businesses with tools that create order out of
chaos, automation out of drudgery. This case study shows how we created Line of Business
solutions for one client that were instrumental in quadrupling the company’s revenue.
Our Client Since 1995: Nina Designs
Nina Designs is a jewelry manufacturer founded in 1983. They design original jewelry
components like beads and clasps, which they hand-manufacture at their factories in Bali and
Thailand. These miniature works of art are marketed worldwide from a robust ecommerce
website, ninadesigns.com, which also integrates most of the company’s business processes.
Matterform Media has provided Line of Business applications to Nina Designs since 1995.
During our nearly 20-year business relationship, we have built systems that impact every part
of their Line of Business. This case study follows just one of the many LoB challenges we’ve
helped our client tackle during two decades of sweeping changes in technology and business.
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A Line of Business Challenge: 100,000 Product Photographs
Nina Designs has designed and marketed more than 5,000 individual products since 1995. Each
unique component is photographed at various sizes and angles, creating an image library in
excess of 100,000 discrete digital files. Managing those files and coordinating them with SKUs,
prices, and other product data is a mission-critical Line of Business challenge for Nina Designs.
A few of the different image sizes and angles required by a single product on
just a single page. http://goo.gl/vXlmS
Growing Line of Business Solutions Over Time
Obviously, Nina Designs didn’t start with 100,000 digital photos. When we began working with
them in 1995, Nina Designs was a traditional mail order company with a black-and-white
printed catalog. Today they are a state-of-the-art ecommerce wholesaler. Business has more than
quadrupled and Nina Designs runs on custom LoB applications designed by Matterform Media.
Nina Cooper, the founder of Nina Designs, saw early on how new internet technologies could
revolutionize her business. Her question for us was how she could justify the cost of a leap into
untried territory, especially with a printed catalog that was out of date and needing a re-print.
In order to build the internet’s first wholesale jewelry website, Nina Designs needed to free up
some resources to invest. We showed them how they could find those resources by streamlining
existing Line of Business processes, specifically their catalog printing process.
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1995: Start-up
Building a Line of Business Process
The 1995 catalog was produced with traditional dark-room photography. Each page comprised
a single photograph picturing ten to twenty different products. Cooper had hoped to be able to
amortize the cost of those original photographs over several catalogs. But with the addition of
new products and discontinuation of others, it was looking like almost every page would have
to be re-shot, at considerable expense, for the next catalog.
Though websites were still brand new, another technology had gradually been reaching
maturity: digital photo processing. We showed Nina Designs how they could use that decade’s
killer app—Photoshop—to separate the full-page layouts into discrete, single-product shots.
The individual product shots could then be mixed and matched with new product shots to
create new layouts, saving hundreds or thousands of dollars in photography expenses.
As a bonus, the newly separated product
photos could be leveraged for use on a new
website. But there was more to be done.
Leverage new technology to save even more
Just finding a way to re-use old photographs
wasn’t going to free up enough resources to
pay for a website. We also had to find a way to
save money on new product photographs.
Matterform evaluated several emerging
technologies, seeking a way to eliminate the
Everyone was pretty shocked when this actually worked
need for expensive dark-room work. Digital photography looked promising, but couldn’t yet
deliver the necessary quality. Matterform ultimately solved the problem by creating a process
where the company’s beads, clasps, and other products could be digitized directly off the glass
of a flat-bed scanner. We developed ways to trick a paper scanner into capturing pictures of
shiny, three-dimensional objects, creating high-quality images at a fraction of the cost of
traditional photography.
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Streamlining the existing, print-based LoB processes freed up resources that could be plowed
into new technologies. The first Nina Designs website went live in 1995 and featured
technologies that were truly cutting-edge for their day, such as database-driven web pages and
a brand new ecommerce interface known today as the online shopping cart.
Gradually automate new processes to manage growth
As Nina Designs continued to expand their product line, it became imperative to automate their
new digital photography processes. One of the first enhancements we introduced was an
automated system in 1997 that could quickly churn out digital files for the different sizes that
were displayed on the website, saving many hours of manual Photoshop work.
But as much as we worked on the website, the printed catalog
was still a core LoB application for many years. A full catalog
was printed every year or two, and supplements of four to
eight pages were mailed out to customers at least once a
quarter. Even with the era’s best desktop publishing tools, the
page layouts were time-consuming to produce. Innumerable
small details multiplied the challenges of quality assurance.
Around the year 2000, Matterform proposed automating the
page layout process to save time and reduce errors.
Matterform developed software that connected the website
Nina Designs never imagined we could
automate their printed catalog too
database to an off-the-shelf desktop publishing program. The
new system coordinated prices, product text, and photographs, and then arranged them all in
an attractive page layout, automatically and accurately.
Nina Designs didn’t ask us for a tool to automate their page layouts because they never
imagined such a thing was even possible. Matterform proposed the software and demonstrated
the ROI. The new Line of Business application paid for itself after two printed catalogs and it
saved Nina Designs tens of thousands of dollars over the next decade.
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2006: Success and Crisis
Revenues quadruple but challenges grow
By the mid-2000s, Nina Designs was running with an entire suite of Line of Business
applications developed by Matterform Media. Revenues had quadrupled and the website had
evolved into the company’s primary sales, marketing, and office-management tool.
But success is precarious. An always-shifting business environment continually put new
pressures on different parts of the Nina Designs Line of Business. By 2006, product photography
processes emerged again as a bottleneck that was holding up expansion. Solutions that were
cutting-edge in the nineties were turning obsolete in the new millennium.
We have met the middleman and he is us
Old technology wasn’t the only problem. As the volume of work increased, we could see that
our relationship with our client had to evolve as well. It was becoming clear that Matterform
was too deeply involved with the daily LoB processes we had created. We could save our client
a lot more money if we could refine their Line of Business applications even further and hand
them over completely to in-house staff.
Our most important job, it turned out, was to put ourselves out of a job.
Replace expensive proprietary systems with new open standards
Our page layout system was a custom network of third-party products. A big improvement
over the manual process, but still too complex for Nina Designs to manage in-house.
Fortunately, new data interchange standards had emerged in recent years, alongside new
desktop publishing tools that could read them. Working with the graphics professional hired by
Nina Designs, we developed a way to embed database information directly in the product
image files as meta-data. The designer easily integrated the new data into her own graphical
layout systems and the improved process was handed over to internal staff, eliminating
Matterform from the expense cycle and freeing up thousands of dollars for re-investment.
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Back to cameras—and back to Bali
Digital photography came into its own in the early 2000s. Our old trick of digitizing beads from
the scanner glass was no longer needed. The factory staff in Bali had been experimenting with
digital cameras and the silversmiths were eager to take on some high-tech work. It seemed like
a good idea, but the communication and quality
assurance challenges were significant.
Matterform helped first by hardening and
documenting standards for the imaging process,
laying out specs for image resolution, file formats,
and other technical matters.
Then Matterform built a custom workflow
application to help coordinate the photography
processes in Indonesia with the quality assurance
and publishing processes in North America. By
This image workflow application helps staff in
Berkeley collaborate with staff in Bali
integrating and automating image workflow
processes, our client was able to take on tasks that they used to pay Matterform for.
Move to the Cloud to make automation even more automatic
But before Bali could start using our new workflow tools, we had to simplify the photography
process even further. There were four separate imaging processes that were managed from
desktop computers: creating multiple image sizes, connecting images to web pages, backing up
image files, and coordinating high-resolution images for print projects.
Matterform simplified the process by building a cloud-based Line of Business application that
could integrate all four imaging processes. Integration made the process simple enough to
operate from Bali. And by moving the processes to the Nina Designs server, we eliminated the
need to install and maintain complicated desktop software.
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2010: Growth
Continuing Enhancement
With all the new Line of Business applications Matterform developed in 2006 and 2007, Nina
Designs settled into a profitable and predictable workflow for all their product photography. Of
course, challenges continue to surface, but our imaging solutions have proved to be flexible
enough to support a number of incremental improvements in recent years.
Capture more traffic from new search tools
As image search engines began to mature, we
noticed that the product images at Nina Designs
were not performing as well as those of their
competitors. This was largely because the image
files at ninadesigns.com were named automatically
by our LoB app, while other sites employed staff to
painstakingly create keyword-rich filenames for
each of their product images.
Because Matterform had already integrated the
As image searches became popular, we enhanced
our LoB apps to meet new search-engine standards
photography and database processes, an automatic solution was close at hand. We simply
upgraded the image naming process to automatically add keywords pulled from the product
database. We instantly boosted search engine traffic without adding anything to the workload
of our Balinese photographers.
Serve more traffic and still save money
By 2011, the website was getting so much traffic that it looked like Nina Designs would soon be
forced to pay for more bandwidth and maybe even a second server. But since Matterform had
already built an automated image workflow, we were able to find a more cost-effective solution.
First, we programmed the website to cache product images on our visitors’ computers. A simple
enough change, but we went on to add one critical enhancement. We upgraded the image app
to include version numbers for each product image. That enabled us to reduce our bandwidth
usage while still ensuring that visitors receive updated images as soon as they are published. By
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upgrading the LoB applications on the server, we enabled our client to postpone a costly
hardware upgrade.
Adapt for high-resolution mobile devices
Gadget makers are always catering to users’ hunger for bigger and prettier pictures, and
websites must do the same. Recent tablet and phone designs offer screen resolutions with five
times the detail of computer monitors from 1999. Our low-resolution images were looking
small, fuzzy and outdated on fancy new smartphones. Customers expected better.
Increasing the resolution of 100,000 digital images would normally be a pretty ambitious
undertaking. But since the processes at Nina Designs are automated, as well as integrated with
the high-resolution print processes, it was easy for us to change the resolution settings and
update every single picture automatically. Our Line of Business applications enabled us to
adapt quickly and automatically to new technology, even technology no one could have
anticipated when the LoB apps were originally developed.
Two decades of experience with Line of Business apps
Matterform Media seeks clients like Nina Designs where we can serve as an essential strategic
partner. Our integrated approach means we offer the greatest value when we can be involved in
a company’s entire Line of Business. Leah Rivers, vice president of Nina Designs, writes:
“Michael is focused on designing systems to help our business grow, often suggesting features
that hadn’t occurred to us, but end up becoming integral elements to our success. In the time that
I’ve been with Nina Designs, our business has grown to over 4 times its original size. This would
not have been possible without Michael and Matterform Media.”
If your company depends on complex systems to operate and stay competitive, Matterform can
help you plan and build solutions that will pay for themselves by increasing your staff’s
productivity and your company’s revenue. Contact Matterform president Michael Herrick at
505-750-3531 or michael@matterform.com and tell us about your Line of Business challenges.
Helping small business work like big business is the challenge we love the most.
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