Overview
Small to mid-scale fashion merchants often struggle to create high-quality product imagery at scale. Professional photoshoots are expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to repeat every time a new collection launches.
At the same time, most Shopify merchants already have product images in their catalogs, but lack the resources to transform them into premium visual assets for product pages, marketing campaigns, and social media.
Photogenix for Shopify was built to bridge this gap — enabling merchants to generate premium e-commerce images and videos directly from their existing product catalog, without leaving Shopify.
The opportunity
Through conversations with fashion brands and internal observations, we identified three recurring challenges:
- Merchants relied heavily on flat-lay or product-only images.
- Content production was expensive and difficult to scale.
- Existing AI workflows required switching between multiple tools and manually re-uploading generated assets.
The opportunity wasn't simply to provide image generation. It was to create a workflow that felt native to the Shopify ecosystem and reduced the effort required to create, manage, and publish visual content.
My role
As the Associate Product Manager, I contributed to:
- Defining product requirements and workflows
- Structuring the end-to-end merchant experience
- Feature prioritization and roadmap discussions
- UI/UX design collaboration and workflow reviews
- Merchant feedback collection and synthesis
- Launch planning and post-launch iteration
Designing the merchant workflow
One of the primary goals was reducing operational complexity for merchants. The generation flow needed to be intuitive enough for first-time users while remaining scalable for merchants managing large catalogs.
This structure let merchants move from product selection to publish-ready content through a guided workflow, rather than navigating multiple disconnected features.
Key product decisions
1. Story-based generation instead of feature-based generation
Early discussions considered exposing generation capabilities directly through technical controls. But merchants think in terms of outcomes, not AI features. They want catalogue photography, marketing visuals, and videos — not prompt engineering, model selection, or generation parameters.
To simplify decision-making, we introduced story-based workflows where users start by selecting the type of content they want to create (e.g. Catalogue Photography, Video Generation). This aligned the product with merchant goals rather than technical functionality.
2. Unified asset management experience
A major friction point in traditional workflows is comparing generated assets against existing catalog imagery. Instead of separating original and generated content, we designed a unified asset experience where merchants could:
- View Shopify images
- View generated assets
- Compare outputs side-by-side
- Reorder content
- Manage publishing decisions
This reduced context switching and made asset evaluation significantly easier.
3. Auto-Config for scalable content production
While manual controls offer flexibility, they become hard to manage across large catalogs. To reduce repetitive setup, we introduced Auto-Config. Merchants define store-level preferences once, and the system automatically selects suitable generation settings, applies story-specific logic, maps products to the right workflows, and chooses relevant visual configurations — balancing automation and output quality while minimizing effort.
Challenges & trade-offs
Balancing automation and control. A key challenge was deciding how much should be automated. Fully automated workflows reduce effort but can produce outputs that don't match merchant expectations; excessive configuration increases complexity and reduces adoption.
To address this, we made Auto-Config the default path while keeping manual configuration available for merchants who wanted more creative control — optimizing for ease of use without fully sacrificing flexibility.
Launch outcomes
The project successfully reached launch readiness with:
- Shopify App Store approval
- Embedded Shopify application experience
- Story-based generation workflow
- Asset management and review workflow
- Shopify sync integration
- Pricing framework
- Auto-Config foundation
The launch also set the groundwork for future improvements in automation quality, onboarding, and generation performance.
What I learned
Moulding an existing product to fit the Shopify case was an interesting thing to learn — stitching the best pieces together rather than forcing the entire app into the Shopify dashboard.
Users care less about the sophistication of the underlying AI and more about how easily a solution fits into their existing workflow. While generation quality mattered, the biggest opportunities often came from reducing friction, simplifying decisions, and helping merchants move from product catalog to publish-ready assets with minimal effort.
This project strengthened my understanding of workflow design, product adoption, and the unique challenges of bringing AI capabilities into existing business processes.