CASE STUDY

A decade with Elizabeth Arden, from retouching to AI

For nearly a decade, Bespoke has been a partner to Elizabeth Arden, and the wider Revlon beauty group, across dozens of campaigns a year. Retouching, CGI, video, and increasingly, AI.

Beauty content looks very different than it did ten years ago. Stills became motion, motion became social, and one campaign now means dozens of assets across formats, channels and markets.

We've stayed close to the technology behind all of it, and each time Elizabeth Arden's needs moved, we moved with them: from retouching to video, CGI and, more recently, AI. The tools keep changing. The consistency and the quality don't.

PRECISION FINISHING

Every asset, delivered to brand standard

Retouching is where our partnership began, and two decades of expertise in it remain the foundation of everything we do. As pipelines grow more complex, with CG, video and AI feeding into the same campaign, retouching is still the skill that brings every asset, whether photographed, rendered or generated, up to the level of quality needed for delivery.

For beauty brands, the details are technical. On color cosmetics, color accuracy comes first: a red has to be that red, a swatch has to read true to shade. On skincare, it's material truth: metal holds its reflection without clipping highlights, glass reads as glass, and the deco, the name, the percentage, the SPF, stays crisp and legible no matter how elaborate the set.

Beauty retouching asks for a different sensitivity. Where product work is about precision, skin is about restraint: keeping texture, tone and expression. The goal is never to erase, it's to refine.

VIDEO POST-PRODUCTION

One team, every stage of the edit

Beauty campaigns today rarely stop at stills. Alongside our retouching team, we have a dedicated video team covering every stage of live-action post: editing that sets the pace, color grading that keeps skin and product true across every cut, VFX that fixes what the camera couldn't, and sound design that finishes the mood. For Elizabeth Arden, that means one partner across both stills and motion, so the two never feel like separate campaigns.

AI SOCIAL

When AI becomes the faster path

For select campaigns, we now build video content for Elizabeth Arden using AI, generating scenes, motion, and product placement without a physical set. It's faster to produce and easier to adapt when a campaign needs to move quickly or scale across many small variations. This runs alongside our live-action work, not instead of it. We help decide, campaign by campaign, which approach actually serves the work.

LOCALIZATION, DELIVERY & TOOLKITS

Built to travel, market by market

A campaign made in one market rarely stays there. For global teams, we build the toolkits that make international rollout possible: localized cuts, adapted deco and formats, and delivery specs tailored to each region, all structured so local teams can move fast. One set of assets, ready for every market that needs them.