This engagement is a good example of what happens when you stop treating AI as an add-on and start treating it as infrastructure. SharkNinja didn’t need a one-off AI experiment - they needed a fundamentally different production model that could scale with their product roadmap and regional ambitions.
The hybrid approach worked because it wasn’t either/or. Virtual production gave us the environmental consistency and repeatability that traditional shoots can’t match at this cadence. AI datasets gave us the product flexibility - including the ability to visualise products that don’t exist yet. Together, they created a pipeline where adding a new region or a new product variant became an operational task, not a production project.
What we find most interesting about this work is the NPD application. Most brands treat content production as something that happens after product development. Here, we made it part of the product development process itself. When you can generate realistic imagery of a colour variant before it goes to manufacturing, content stops being a downstream cost and starts being an upstream decision-making tool.
