The Studio & Ecommerce Collective

Most studio leaders already know where the time is going. Chasing approvals, reconciling spreadsheets, answering status requests that should never have needed to be asked. The problem is not identifying it. It is quantifying it in a way that the business will act on.In this solo episode, Rich walks through the methodology behind the Studio Chaos Calculator, a tool built from over a hundred studio visits that helps studio leaders put a real figure on what operational inefficiency is costing their teams. Five categories: status chasing, data reconciliation, rework, manual admin for creatives, and visibility overhead. Each one a drain that compounds quietly across every product, every shoot, every launch.The Studio Tax is not a people problem. It is a systems problem. But without a number attached to it, it rarely gets the investment it deserves.This episode gives you the framework to build that case. Medium-sized studio teams are typically losing between £250,000 and £750,000 a year to this overhead. Most do not know it until they run the numbers.The Studio Chaos Calculator is free to use at letsflo.co/the-collective. It takes around five minutes and produces a breakdown you can take straight to the business.

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.

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

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.

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.