Why fashion brands leave 40% of their collection on the table
Peter Thörngren
CEO & Co-founder, Lumoo
I've spoken to a lot of fashion brands over the past few years. And almost every one of them has the same quiet frustration: a collection that never fully made it to market. Not because the products weren't good. Because the images weren't ready in time.
The standard shoot-based production model has a fixed capacity. You book a studio, you hire a photographer, you bring the samples. And then you make decisions, often painful ones, about what gets shot and what gets left out. Hero products get the attention. The rest of the collection gets rushed, cut, or quietly deprioritised.
What happens next is predictable. The products that didn't get proper imagery don't sell. Or they sell far below their potential. Conversion on product pages without strong visuals can be less than half that of pages with them. That's not a creative problem. That's a revenue problem.
"The industry has accepted this as the cost of doing business. I don't think it has to be."
But it compounds further. When production is expensive and time-constrained, brands start making creative compromises earlier in the process, before anything is even shot. Fewer styling options. Fewer colourways explored. Fewer contexts imagined. The collection that reaches the consumer is already a reduced version of what it could have been.
What struck me when we started building Lumoo was that the problem isn't really about photography. It's about capacity. Traditional production scales linearly: more images means more time, more cost, more logistics. AI-powered visual production doesn't work that way. The marginal cost of producing imagery for your tenth product is the same as your hundredth. Suddenly, leaving half your collection unshot isn't a trade-off you have to make.
The brands I admire most are the ones that treat every product in their collection as worth showing properly. Not just the hero pieces. Every colourway, every variation, every context a customer might see themselves in. That's the standard AI makes possible, and the gap between brands who adopt it and those who don't is only going to widen.
Forty percent is a conservative estimate. For some brands, it's higher. And it's sitting there, every season, waiting.
What this looks like in practice
Gina Tricot is one of the brands putting this into practice right now. They're implementing AI across their entire visual workflow, from design and production through to their B2B process. Not as an experiment, but as a core part of how they operate.
What makes their approach stand out is the scope. This isn't about replacing a single photoshoot or automating one step. It's about rethinking visual production as something that runs alongside the collection itself, at the same speed and at the same scale.
The result is that every product gets the imagery it deserves, regardless of where it sits in the collection hierarchy. Colourways that would have been deprioritised are now fully represented. B2B buyers see the full range, styled and shot to the same standard. Nothing gets left behind because of production bottlenecks.
That's the shift we're seeing across the industry. The brands moving fastest aren't treating AI as a cost-saving tool. They're treating it as a way to finally show their full collection to the world.
See how Lumoo helps brands produce their full collection.
