Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Cape Union Mart is a renowned multi-chain retailer and a valued customer of our partner, Enhance Retail. With over 300 stores, Cape Union Mart is well-established in outdoor, footwear, and fashion and carries popular brands like K-Way, one of the largest brands manufactured in South Africa.
Enhance Retail checked in with Cape Union Mart’s CTO, Grant De Waal-Dubla, about improving efficiencies in their e-commerce studio and how Profoto StyleShoots technology helped the brand position itself as one of the South African market leaders.
Creating efficiencies to upscale the retailer’s content creation
Cape Union Mart’s content creation studio caters to several brands with different style guides and a need for high-quality visual content. "When I took over in 2020, part of my role has always been to create efficiencies in everything I do,” states Grant De Waal-Dubla. “I found that our photography studio was unable to fulfill the requirements of the business.”
In September 2020, Cape Union Mart purchased Live and Eclipse from our partner Enhance Retail, followed by Vertical in 2021. Using Profoto StyleShoots has quickly helped the team around Grant create efficiencies in the content studio.
Speeding up their time-to-market while going live with more high-quality content
“One of the things the brands have been really excited about is the level of consistency we can now achieve throughout our sites,” explains Grant. “The volume we can do is also something they’ve been super excited about. We’re up to about seven images per product, whereas before, we were only able to do one or two."
Combining mannequin and model photography has helped the team to speed up their time-to-market and get products online quicker. “We’ve seen that we need to bring things to market quicker, so adopting Vertical has enabled us to shoot both on mannequin to bring something online immediately and then shoot on model later."
Simplifying and speeding up studio processes has never been easier
“Even if a photographer isn’t present, a stylist can step in and take on that role because you’re able to lock in presets and lighting,” says Roche Roberson, e-commerce photographer and part of the Cape Union Mart studio team. Roche and her team can now style and capture content easily and quickly thanks to Profoto’s user-friendly capturing and exporting process that exports directly to our post-production partners or your webshop. "With exporting and processing my images, it’s easier for me to simplify my process.”
Seamless integration into existing company infrastructure
Integrating Profoto technology into Cape Union Mart’s existing infrastructure and studio workflow was easy and done quickly so the team could upscale their content creation in little time. Besides capturing around seven images per product, the content team is now able to produce videos for an even better customer experience. “The way that we could bring Profoto into our processes quickly and deliver things like videos which we’ve never been able to do before,” says Grant.
By making use of fewer but better resources, Cape Union Mart has been able to create a strong position in the South African market. “Mixing a quality of great staff and great technology allows us to do so much more with so much less."
