How LubanAI Started: $1,000 a Month on Amazon Product Photos
I write code for a living. My girlfriend is the boss. Of her own store, that is: she sells clothes on Amazon.
Clothing runs on seasons, so fresh styles land every month. When a shipment arrives, the boxes line up. She opens them, checks every tag, hangs each piece, and smooths out whatever came out of the box creased. Customer email can wait until noon: returns, delivery windows, questions about which colors work together. A shoot booked for the afternoon means the new pieces get prepped and sent off. Her evening goes to packing orders and printing labels, and she sets aside whatever ships the next day.
The loop repeats daily, wound tight like a clock that never stops. The wider economy has been sluggish lately, and the markdowns keep landing. At month end she does the books, and the remainder is thin.
$1,000 a month
Amazon asks for a model in the clothing main image. She has stuck with one photographer for years and with the same models for a long time, and the rate is already on the low side. Even so, one outfit costs about $50 to shoot and retouch. Multiply by twenty new outfits a month and you get $1,000.
Photographer and model both need the same free day. The clothes go out, and then the waiting starts: selects first, retouch after. Some images also need a white background, which means the retoucher traces along collar and cuffs to lift both model and garment clear of the backdrop, then sets that cutout onto white. That's 10 minutes an image. Her opinions on styling are firm, so she stands at the retoucher's shoulder calling out changes. Twenty outfits later, most of a day is gone.
That time before Prime Day
In the run-up to Prime Day, new styles arrived in a burst. Shooting and retouching ate a full day, right up to midnight. She ate nothing at all. Exhaustion put her straight to sleep.
Watching that daily grind was more than I could take. Well. If I'm honest, I was worried that all that exhaustion would show and she wouldn't look as pretty.
So I used what I'm good at. I built LubanAI, an AI toolkit for ecommerce sellers that costs nothing to start using. Vibe Coding, my hands on the wheel. Tool number one was hers: AI Product Photo. At the start she wasn't impressed and had little appetite for it. The neckline came out wrong, or the color, or the model's pose, so each attempt came out worse in some way than the shoot she had paid for. She'd glance at my output, then go book the photographer and the model again. I pinned the photographer's finals next to mine and kept reworking prompts and code.
A bit over a month in, we laid them out side by side. Certain images were ready to go live. A handful, to my eye, came out cleaner than the $50 ones. Not all of them. Any time she wasn't happy, I went back to work.
The main image used to take half an hour
These days she shoots the garment with her phone, pulls up a model photo from an earlier set, and the new outfit lands on that model. She gets a main image of the model wearing it, on white. That one image used to cost half an hour of shooting and cutout work.
Her calendar no longer has to absorb those 20 new outfits a month.
Inbound still happens. So do sorting, shipping, and the customer replies. The photos, though, handed back a big chunk of time (and money). Coffee with me fits into her day now. So does the gym, and she's looking better for it.
One more thing: she's fully on board with AI in the store these days, and she's already after me to build AI Product Detail Page and AI Product Video.
