What does it actually take to build a studio that delivers at scale, without losing the creative energy that makes the work good?

It is one of the most common tensions in high-volume e-commerce studios. The pressure to produce more, faster, is constant. But the moment a studio starts to feel like a production line, the quality and the people start to slip.

Alison Leibowitz has been inside that tension more than most. She joined Net-a-Porter to open and lead their US studio in New Jersey, inheriting 30 people who had not asked to move there and did not want to be there. Three years later, she had grown that team to 150 and increased output capacity by 400%.

Here is what she learned.

The first problem is never operational

When Alison arrived, the business expected her to start solving operational challenges. What she found instead was a people problem.

The team had been relocated from Long Island City to New Jersey without much say in the matter. They were commuting two hours each way. Creative direction was still being signed off in London, which meant the US team started every morning behind, wading through long email feedback threads on work that had already been shot.

Her first visible move was renegotiating studio hours so the team could beat rush hour.

A small change that sent a clear signal: their lives outside of work mattered.

Before workflow tools, before capacity planning, before anything else, the team needed to believe she had their back.

Hiring for fit, not just for talent

Growing from 30 to 150 people in three years creates enormous pressure to fill roles quickly.

Alison made a deliberate decision not to do that.

Studios are tight working environments. Photographers, stylists and assistants are on set together all day. One person with a difficult ego can shift the entire dynamic.

Her rule was simple: she met every single person before an offer was made.

She also looked beyond the obvious talent pools, partnering with nearby colleges and hiring a photographer straight out of school who, 13 years later, is now the photography manager.

The investment in early cohesion paid off. A team that trusts each other delivers better work and stays longer.

Stay interviews: the approach nobody talks about

Most businesses conduct exit interviews. They sit down with people on their way out and ask what went wrong.

By that point, it is already too late to act on the information.

Alison flipped the model.

She identified her top performers and sat down with them to ask:

• Why are you staying?

• What do you enjoy?

• What would make you leave?

The answers told her what to protect, what to fix, and where people were quietly struggling before it became a retention problem.

If you manage a studio and you are not doing this, it is worth starting.

Breaking down the black box

Studio teams often operate behind closed doors.

Product arrives, content comes out.

The rest of the business does not understand what happens in between.

At Net-a-Porter, Alison ran studio tours for buyers and merchandisers. She showed them that a single outfit took hours of styling, lighting decisions, colour grading and video work to get right.

She opened up hot desks on set so people from other departments could spend an afternoon watching the process.

The effect was immediate.

Once buyers could see what actually went into the work, they stopped treating the studio as a machine that could absorb any last-minute request.

They started asking better questions.

And when the studio said no, it meant no.

Letting the team solve the problems

When the business was pushing for greater throughput, Alison ran a workshop rather than mandate new workflows.

She asked every person in the studio to think about what was slowing them down.

She built a virtual whiteboard and let the team populate it with ideas, with everyone able to vote on each other's suggestions.

The answers that came back were things no manager would have spotted from the outside.

A product sitting on a rack for half a day because nobody knew whose job it was to move it.

Retouchers not knowing which items had been shot because there was no divider on the rail.

When the improvements came from the team, rolling them out was straightforward.

It was their idea, implemented with their own buy-in.

Keeping the magic alive at scale

The risk in a high-volume environment is numbness.

The most extraordinary product can start to feel like just another item on a list.

Alison's response was to create space for craft outside of targets: after-hours creative nights where the team could use the studio, the equipment and the models to experiment freely.

No deadlines, no daily count, no commercial pressure.

The signal that it was working came from an unexpected place.

The COO visited one day and ended the debrief not talking about cost savings or metrics, but about a group of people dancing on set.

That energy was what told him the studio was in good shape.

When you make it a place people want to work, you get the best work out of those people.