Ten years ago, I founded Grand Shooting with a simple conviction: visual content production for retail and fashion deserved its own platform. Not a simple module bolted onto a PIM or a DAM. Not a generic image tool. A system designed from end to end to orchestrate the creation, transformation and distribution of media for the fashion and retail industries.
Today, we’re taking a major structural step forward: AutoRetouch, Diffusely’s fashion vertical, is joining Grand Shooting. Together, we’re creating the first European AI-powered visual production platform for fashion and retail.
This is not a pivot. It’s the logical acceleration of everything we’ve been building for ten years.
When I founded Grand Shooting, fashion brands and retailers were investing heavily in PIMs to enrich their product data: centralization, consistency and data quality, but also time-to-market reduction. Oddly enough, these tools addressed catalog data but not media.
Because producing media is not the same as contributing a simple attribute like a label. The visual production cycle has its own stakeholders — photographers, stylists, retouchers, art directors —, its own ecosystem, its own technical constraints. The resources required are considerably greater. And above all, scaling demands an infrastructure capable of processing hundreds of thousands of visuals with SLAs above 99.99%.
That’s exactly what we built. Year after year, client after client, integration after integration. Ten years ago, the adventure began with our first clients: Ba&sh, Celio, La Redoute, SMCP. With our first agency partners: Artifices and Sheriff. Today, these clients and partners still stand with us on this journey, and their loyalty is something I hold dear. I want to take this opportunity to thank them warmly.
Over the years, we’ve had the chance and the pleasure to grow the solution with remarkable maisons across fashion, luxury, home, culture and many other verticals. We’ve also learned a great deal from our work with industry federations, notably the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode and the Fédération Française du Prêt-à-Porter Féminin.
Let’s be direct.
Since the end of Covid, the industry has been flooded with generative AI hype. First GANs, then diffusion models, then LLMs. With each wave, the same promises: everything will be automated, costs will collapse, content will be generated in a single click.
We’ve always told the truth. To our clients and to the market. Technology only matters if it delivers tangible gains at industrial scale. The famous scaling challenge. Not an impressive demo on a cherry-picked sample. Not a prototype that works in a lab. A solution that holds up when you’re processing thousands of SKUs per week with fashion-grade quality requirements: texture fidelity, color accuracy, cross-channel consistency.
That’s why we’ve invested in R&D with discernment, never yielding to the temptation of hype. We’re not an AI startup looking for a problem to solve. We’re an industrial production platform that integrates AI where it delivers real value.
Over the past six months, something has fundamentally changed.
The latest generations of generative AI algorithms have crossed a decisive threshold. For the first time, the results genuinely meet market standards. 4K quality. Faithful rendering of textures and materials. Accurate proportions and colors. Sufficient consistency for industrial-scale deployment.
Faced with this acceleration, we had two options. Invest heavily in internal R&D to develop our own algorithms — with a minimum two-to-three-year horizon. Or join forces with a player that had already solved this problem.
The market wasn’t waiting. We chose speed and excellence.
We evaluated the market. Very few players met our criteria.
AutoRetouch is one of the rare companies to combine the ability to train algorithms 100% in-house with the capacity to integrate the best models available on the market — all within a best-of-breed approach. Furthermore, their internally developed models are trained on datasets they fully own the intellectual property for. For our clients, this means zero legal risk related to training data — a topic that has become critical in an increasingly demanding European regulatory environment.
But beyond the technology, it's the team that convinced us. AutoRetouch has an R&D team entirely dedicated to AI, capable of integrating the next state-of-the-art breakthroughs as they emerge. In a field where the technological frontier shifts every month, this absorptive capacity is a decisive competitive advantage.
The quality level achieved by their algorithms is, to our knowledge, among the most advanced on the market. That's rare. And it's exactly what we needed.
The Grand Shooting and AutoRetouch merger creates something that doesn’t exist anywhere else on the market.
An end-to-end solution— in our view the only one — that enables a retail or fashion player to combine hybrid workflows integrating traditional production and retouching techniques with generative AI. All within a single, orchestrated, industrialized platform.
Concretely, this means our clients can now, within a single workflow: manage a traditional photoshoot; apply manual retouching where needed; activate generative AI models —background removal with shadow, background swapping, virtual model — on the product categories where it makes sense; and distribute finalized media across all channels with the appropriate technical specifications.
Grand Shooting is the architect that organizes data and workflows. AutoRetouch is the intelligent factory that executes production at scale. Together, we cover the entire value chain, from capture to final delivery.
Many market players sell the dream of “all-AI.” We don’t believe in that vision. Not today.
Brands have quality requirements, style requirements and consistency requirements that AI alone cannot guarantee 100%. AI is a tool and, like all tools, it must empower humans to help them deliver their full potential.
That’s exactly what our hybrid platform enables. Humans step in where the expert eye makes the difference. Our “human-in-the-loop” infrastructure guarantees that no image is published without that expert eye. The result: workflow efficiency gains, with no compromise on quality.
Grand Shooting is ten years old. Ten years of patiently building an infrastructure, a client network, deep integrations with the PIM and DAM ecosystem, with the ecosystem of photo studios, production and retouching agencies. Ten years understanding production workflows down to the smallest detail. Ten years building trust with the greatest brands.
These foundations aren’t built in a day. They can’t be bought either. They’re the result of expertise acquired season after season, collection after collection.
AutoRetouch brings the accelerator we were missing. We’re integrating their cutting-edge AI capabilities, adding an ultra-performant AI engine to an already operational infrastructure.
I remain CEO of the combined Grand Shooting + AutoRetouch entity. Gaétan Rougevin-Baville and Fanny Kauffer, respectively CEO and CRO of Diffusely, are joining our board. Their experience in scaling vertical AI solutions and their knowledge of the visual production market will be invaluable assets going forward.
This governance reflects our ambition: to build the European leader in AI-powered visual production for fashion and retail.
Our roadmap is clear.
Consolidate the technical integration to deliver a unified experience in the coming months. Accelerate deployment to our clients who have been requesting these AI capabilities for months. We will become the leading platform for visual production in fashion and retail. And we will continue to advance our algorithms at the pace of state-of-the-art breakthroughs.
To the market, we say this: you no longer have to choose between AI and human-centered collaborative workflows. Between automation and quality. Between speed and control. The platform that combines all of this exists now.
To the AutoRetouch team joining us: welcome. What you’ve built is remarkable. Together, we’re going to make it something even greater.
To our clients: this is for you. The best technology powering the best platform, so you can produce faster, better, and at lower cost.
Ten years of foundations. AI as the accelerator. And now, what comes next.
Pierre Humblot-Ferrero
Co-Founder & CEO, Grand Shooting
