The Studio & Ecommerce Collective

#4 Inside a World-Class Studio With Alison Leibowitz

What does it actually take to build a world-class e-commerce studio from the ground up? Alison Leibowitz spent 13 years as Head of Studio at Net-a-Porter, growing a team of 30 to 150 and increasing output capacity by 400%. In this episode, she sits down with Rich to share the lessons behind those numbers, from inheriting a reluctant team to keeping 150 creatives producing at their best without burning out. Alison talks through how she hired for fit as much as talent, why stay interviews gave her a blueprint no exit interview ever could, and how opening the studio doors to the wider business changed everything. Oh, and why the COO left a site visit talking about a dance party instead of cost savings. Honest, practical and straight from someone who has lived it. Essential listening for anyone leading a studio operation at scale.

#3 How to Audit Your Studio and Start Fixing It

Most studios know something is broken. Few know where to start. In this episode, Rich Summers and Johan Santos walk through a practical, step-by-step process for auditing your entire content production workflow, finding the burning room, and building a plan that your teams will actually own. Also mentioned in this episode: The Studio Chaos Audit guide, available to download via the link below. It covers every stage of the audit process, the workshop formats, the gotchas, and what good output looks like at each step. Get in touch: letsflow.co

#2 We Hosted Our First Event for Studio Teams & The Insights are Unreal

Following the first episode, Rich Summers and Johan Santos reconvene from Brooklyn to reflect on the inaugural Studio and E-commerce Collective event and why bringing this community together matters. They dig into the real pressures facing studio teams at scale: sample visibility, data integrity, resource planning, and the compounding cost of small inefficiencies across high-volume production pipelines. Johan shares what drew him to Lets Flo after two decades in the industry, and why reducing burnout across studio teams sits at the heart of the platform's mission. The conversation also touches on where AI fits into the future of e-commerce content production and what it actually means to run a studio that operates as a single source of truth, from sample check-in through to site. If you work in or around a studio, this one is for you.

#1 Moving away from "We've always done it this way"

In our first episode, Rich sits down with Johan Santos, a commercial fashion and e-commerce photographer with almost 20 years of experience across studios including Moda Operandi, Anthropologie and some of New York's biggest fashion brands. They talk about studio chaos: the spreadsheets nobody trusts, the workflows nobody questions, the data that's dead on arrival, and what happens when talented teams are too busy firefighting to fix the thing that's slowing them down. If you've ever thought "we've just always done it this way," this one's for you.