Squeezles: Squishy toys
Trend Toys came back with another product range they are developing, Squeezles.
Squishy, squidgy toys like these are a big seller right now and thus Trend Toys needed a brand to get on the train, thus I set to work in creating a logo, packaging style, and adapting/generating photography to present to potential customers.
Trend wanted something fun and approachable for the target market – ie kids 3+. The style requires some broad appeal as these kinds of toy are not just used by young children – the largest age range is 6 to 12 years, with some teens and adults using them for stress relief and fidgeting.
To get a feel for the brand they wanted to develop, Trend Toys created a few ideas using AI tools, which I then ran with to develop assets which could be rolled out to product and packaging concepts.
As ever, product photography for white label factories tends to be incredibly poor. I’ve always found this strange given that the factories make the actual products, so why wouldn’t they produce and collate assets which will help them sell their products. Good quality images will even assist would-be distributors to create good visuals to help the distributor gauge interest of the product in their market zone.
But this is where I come in. In the past, I’ve set up cheap and cheerful photography studios to produce good quality, usable imagery once samples have been received from the factory. But, given the time for samples to arrive from the far east to the UK, weeks can be lost, and with a hot trend product, those weeks can mean a lot of lost sales.
Latterly though I’ve been leaning on AI tools to generate decent quality, reasonable resolution images from poor quality, factory supplied shots. Most of the product images you see above are essentially AI generated using my prompting, from poor initial photos.