The Collective
Blogs & Guides
Updated 2026
A new community for the people running the world's highest-volume e-commerce studios.
If you run a studio, you already know the feeling. The product is brilliant. The team is brilliant. But somehow, by Wednesday afternoon, half the week has disappeared into spreadsheets, status updates and chasing samples that should have been checked in yesterday.
You are not alone. And that is exactly the point.
Today we are launching The Studio & E-commerce Collective. A space for the people doing this work to actually talk to each other. The studio managers, heads of production, photographers, stylists, sample managers, retouchers, producers. Everyone whose job it is to get thousands of products online, at pace, without the whole thing falling over.
Why we are doing this
Lets Flo has spent the last decade inside some of the biggest e-commerce studios in the world. Burberry. Ralph Lauren. Gymshark. Boden. Frasers Group. John Lewis. JC Penney. The same pattern shows up everywhere, regardless of brand size or sector.
Studio teams are brilliant at their jobs, but they spend most of their week on work that is not their job. Importing product data. Retyping SKU codes into file names. Answering status requests. Untangling miscommunications between teams that should never have been siloed in the first place.
We call this Studio Chaos. It is not a one-off disaster. It is the daily overhead your team pays just to keep the lights on. And because everyone is living in it, it starts to feel normal.
Here is the thing we kept noticing: the studio community used to talk to each other more. People knew their counterparts at other brands. They swapped stories. They compared notes. Somewhere along the way, a lot of that dried up. Studio and production leaders ended up solving the same problems in parallel, from different cities, at different companies, without ever comparing notes.
We want to change that. The Collective exists to rebuild that network. To give the people running these studios a place to share what is working, what is painful, and what the rest of the industry is quietly figuring out.
Who it is for
The Collective is built for the people inside high-volume e-commerce studios. If any of these sound like you, you are exactly who we had in mind:
Studio Managers and Heads of Studio running in-house operations at scale
Heads of Production, Directors of Creative Operations, and the people coordinating shoots across multiple sets and locations
Sample managers who know where every piece lives (and the ones who are trying to get there)
Photographers, stylists, digiops, retouchers. Anyone whose day should be spent on craft, not admin
Merchandisers and content operations leads who are trying to get visibility into what the studio is actually doing
Whether you are running a studio shooting 3,000 SKUs a year or 300,000, the problems rhyme. Sample chaos, spreadsheet sprawl, the black box between studio and merchandising, the creeping burnout that comes from asking creative people to spend their days doing admin. You will find peers here who understand it without needing the context explained.
What to expect
The podcast
Real conversations about how studio operations actually work at scale. The first episodes are live now, with Rich Summers (Lets Flo CEO and co-founder) and Johan Santos (commercial fashion and e-commerce photographer with 18+ years across brands including Moda Operandi, Anthropologie, Nike, and Lacoste). Episode one unpacks Studio Chaos. What it looks like, what causes it, and what a high-functioning studio looks like on the other side. Episode two recaps our first Collective event in Brooklyn and the conversations that came out of it.
Upcoming episodes will bring in external guests from leading studio and production teams. Inside looks. Honest conversations. No product pitches.
Events
Small, invitation-only gatherings for studio and e-commerce leaders. We kicked off in Brooklyn at Saloon. No panels, no hard sell, just the right people in a room with a drink in hand. London is next. Paris is on the horizon. The format is deliberately low-pressure. As one attendee told us, rank and title stop mattering. People just want to talk about the work.
Written guides and frameworks
Practical, download-worthy pieces drawing on what we see inside studios every week. Our first guide, "Your studio team spends half their week on work that isn't their job," is available now. It is a framework for recognising Studio Chaos, quantifying what it costs, and mapping what the best studios are doing to fix it. More guides on sample management, shoot planning, studio benchmarking, and the business case for content operations are on the way.
The newsletter
Short, opinionated, useful. A take from a recent episode. The goal is to be something you actually open on a Monday morning.
LinkedIn posts
You’ll see me posting regularly from my LinkedIn account with regular snippets from the pod and insights from events.
A note on Lets Flo
The Collective is hosted by Lets Flo, the e-commerce studio operations platform built originally inside the Burberry studio and now used by brands including Ralph Lauren, Gymshark, Boden, Frasers Group, and John Lewis. We think it is worth being upfront about that.
But The Collective is not a marketing programme dressed up as a community. We built it because we think the conversation in this industry deserves a better space. The podcast does not sell Lets Flo. The events are not demo pitches. The guides are useful whether you ever become a customer or not. If, along the way, you decide you want to talk to us about the product, the door is always open. If you don't, you are just as welcome to stick around.
This industry is smaller than it looks. Most of the people solving these problems already know each other, or are one connection away. The Collective is just a way of making those connections easier, and giving everyone in this world a slightly less chaotic week.
See you at the next one.
The Lets Flo team
PART 2: NEWSLETTER
We are launching something.
Issue #1: The Studio & E-commerce Collective
Hello,
Quick question before we start. What percentage of your studio team's week is spent on the creative work you actually hired them for?
If you are being honest, it is probably around half. Maybe less. The rest is status updates, sample hunts, SKU code retyping, and meetings that could have been a dashboard.
We have been watching this pattern repeat across every studio we have worked with, from Burberry to Boden to Frasers Group. And we kept thinking: surely the people living this every day should be talking to each other more.
So we built a space for exactly that.
Introducing The Studio & E-commerce Collective
A new community for studio managers, heads of production, and the teams running high-volume e-commerce studios. Peer-led, honest, and built around the stuff that actually matters, not the glossy stuff.
Here is what you can dip into right now:
🎙 The podcast. Two episodes live. Rich Summers (Lets Flo) in conversation with Johan Santos on Studio Chaos, sample management, burnout, AI, and what the best studios are quietly doing differently.
📄 The first guide. "Your studio team spends half their week on work that isn't their job." A framework for recognising the real cost of manual processes, and what to do about it.
🥂 The events. We kicked off in Brooklyn. London is next. Paris is on the horizon. Small, invite-only, no hard sell.
✉️ This newsletter. Short, useful, one idea at a time. Which brings us to...
One idea worth sitting with this week
Most studios we meet believe their biggest problem is photography throughput, or file management, or post-production capacity. Then we map the full chain end to end with them.
The burning room is almost always sample management.
It is upstream of everything. Get it wrong and every downstream team pays for it. Stylists can't build outfits, photographers shoot the top and have to come back for the bottoms, retouchers chase missing assets, merchandisers can't launch. Get it right and the whole studio starts to breathe again.
Worth asking your team this week: if a merchandiser asked right now where a specific sample was, how long would it take to answer?
Want in?
Three things you can do from here:
Subscribe to the podcast
Download the first guide here
Reach out if you want an invite to the next event, or if you would be up for being a guest on the podcast
This is the first issue of many. Thanks for being here at the start.
Until next week,
Rich & the Lets Flo team
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8 mins
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