Flair.ai Remakes Product Photography

Mickey Friedman co-launched Flair.ai in 2022, a year after graduating from the University of Chicago. The company, which has raised $5 million in seed funding, deploys artificial intelligence to perfect product photos, providing entire virtual scenes and setups.

The process, she says, remakes ecommerce photography by dramatically lowering the cost of photo shoots while improving quality.

In our recent conversation, she addressed the rise of visual AI, the necessity of human intervention, and more. The entire audio is embedded below. The transcript is edited for length and clarity.

Eric Bandholz: Who the heck are you?

Mickey Friedman: I own a company called Flair. We launched in 2023. We’re building an AI tool for product photos, visualizations, and animations. We’re trying to streamline the photo shoot process into an easy-to-use virtual studio at a much lower cost.

We’re a team of five. We’ve onboarded over a million users now.

We start with merchants’ existing product photos. We perform color corrections, preserve the lettering, and provide an entire virtual scene. Brand and text preservation are important to us.

I was early on in the AI art scene. I was interested in marketing and photo shoots, but I was more drawn to the creative process, playing around with AI models to create art. The process in the early days was taking a bit of text and generating images. There’s still a place for that, such as Midjourney. But ecommerce companies want to preserve their brands and assets and control the visual arrangement of their scenes.

Bandholz: How are merchants using your tool thus far?

Friedman: Images for landing pages and organic social posts are very popular. We’re trying to define the creative process of a photo shoot. Many AI tools remove humans from that process, but we want the opposite, where our customers execute whatever vision they have.

Folks who gravitate to Flair are often at the intersection of ecommerce and creativity — an in-house design team or an agency. They understand our platform intuitively.

There’s a lot of storyboarding on Flair. We’ve had customers with a vision of a dream photo shoot they can’t execute because of extensive coordination and cost. Using Flair, they upload the raw product photos to the canvas, find the props they need, and more or less replicate their photo shoot on the platform.

Bandholz: Flair seems poised to scale.

Friedman: It is a very large market. We want every brand in the world to use us in some capacity. Smaller brands with budget constraints could transition photo shoots, while larger brands that can afford photo shoots need better tools.

Regardless, as long as businesses require photo shoots, Flair will hopefully be involved in their workflow. That’s our goal.

We’re branching out into verticals. For fashion brands, we can place a sweater on a virtual human model, for example. For product commercials, we reduce the cost.

We want as much traction as possible with smaller brands. But we will likely move upmarket a bit, although we’ll never be too expensive — way less than $500 a month.

Over time, our AI models will improve, thus improving image quality. Eventually, we will create banner ads. Everything will be AI-generated. My only hope is that humans are at the center of that process. They direct it instead of a black box algorithm.

Bandholz: Where can people sign up for Flair and follow you?

Friedman: The platform is Flair.ai. You can add me on LinkedIn or follow me on X, @mickeyxfriedman.

For Manly Bands, Manufacturing Is Storytelling Gold

Manly Bands is a direct-to-consumer seller of men’s rings. The company launched in 2016 after John Ruggiero, the co-founder with his wife Michelle, couldn’t find a suitable wedding band.

This is Ruggiero’s second appearance on the podcast. In April 2021, we discussed the company’s founding, unique ring materials, and more. Since then, Manly Bands has acquired its manufacturer. The making of rings from, say, Jack Daniel’s whiskey barrels or Fender guitar strings creates compelling video, says Ruggiero, perfect for storytelling on social media and elsewhere.

The entire audio of our conversation is embedded below. The transcript is edited for length and clarity.

Eric Bandholz: Give us a rundown of what you do.

John Ruggiero: My wife, Michelle, and I started an online ring company called Manly Bands in 2016 to solve a problem of wedding bands for men. We were just married. I have large fingers and couldn’t find a ring that I liked that was not overpriced. My options were ordering from a catalog or having something custom-made.

I ended up buying from a website. The ring arrived in a flat mailer, with no box or customer service. It was a horrible experience by today’s ecommerce standards.

We got married, moved to Florida, and needed a job. We told ourselves, “We’re both entrepreneurs. Why don’t we create our own business?” We discussed the types of problems we’d seen and how to solve them. My ring experience came up, and we opted to try to solve it for other guys.

Our goal when we started was to pay rent. We thought making a couple thousand dollars a month from this would be fantastic. We considered it a lifestyle business, not high-growth. It was just Michelle and me in our garage designing rings and sending them out to customers. We had hit on something. Our message resonated with prospects.

Michelle and I make an excellent team. I come up with ideas, and she’s the implementer. A lot of our success goes to her creative mind. She names the rings and develops personas. She connects the rings to customers. Describing a ring solely as “eight-millimeter black” didn’t cut it.

We designed rings from unique materials, such as Jack Daniel’s barrels or special metals. The business took off. Since then, we’ve grown dramatically. We now have over 55 people in the Manly Bands family. About half of those are ring artisans who work in our recently acquired manufacturing shop in Utah.

Bandholz: When did you acquire a manufacturer?

Ruggiero: About a year and a half ago. We had been their customer for years, so we knew them well. Most of their business was wholesale, which didn’t interest us — going to mom-and-pop jewelers. They retained their wholesale customers and brand name. We acquired some of their assets and brought over employees.

Bringing on a manufacturing team has been one of the best things we’ve done. It’s been incredible to go out there and watch them make rings out of Fender guitar strings or metal from an M1 Abrams tank.

Bandholz: How does in-house manufacturing impact marketing?

Ruggiero: It’s been huge. Taking a camera to the other side of the office and filming the team using lathes to cut the metal rods or whiskey barrels into rings makes for incredible video. We have our camera crew out there all the time. We use that footage on our social media and in our ads and newsletters. We try to promote that because most companies in the men’s ring space don’t manufacture. They drop ship or order from overseas and then ship it out. But we want it to last a lifetime and be something people can take pride in.

We’ve had a lot of success with our military heritage collection, where we source unique military materials. We have the M1 Garand rifle stock, the wood part, from World War I. Watching our team put that in the lathe and cut a piece out for a ring is fascinating.

Our marketing for those rings talks about the history, the soldiers, where the weapon was used, and things like that. My wife and I studied filmmaking in college. We use our skills to educate and tell a story. For instance, I recently received an email from a customer who shared that his grandfather used to drive M1 tanks. The customer gifted one of those rings to his grandfather, and they had quite an emotional exchange. It’s nice to help customers connect with their past and create something meaningful.

Bandholz: Where can people buy a ring from you?

Ruggiero: ManlyBands.com. We have pictures on Instagram, too. I’m on Twitter and LinkedIn.