At Pixelz, we have over 1,000 retouchers working within our Specialist Assisted Workflow (S.A.W.™) production system, allowing us to deliver tens of thousands of images every day, returning images to our customers in as little as three hours.

But having so many retouchers working from three different offices across two countries presents a unique challenge: when onboarding a new customer, how do you quickly train hundreds of editors in high-level retouching skills to handle all those new images entering the production system while also maintaining quality?

Our solution: develop the most powerful e-learning platform in our industry.

E-Learning as a Differentiator

In our industry, training plays a critical role in the process of onboarding a new customer.

In terms of training, a typical company will prepare their retouching capacity (training reotuchers) for a new customer by conducting training for 15 to 20 retouchers at a time in a classroom setting.

There are severe limitations in training this way, primarily in terms of scalability. What happens if that new customer requires retouching capacity (and thus, training) of 50 retouchers? 100 retouchers? Or 500 retouchers? For most companies, training at that scale can take as long a six months including the training the retouchers in the classroom, sending test images to their retouchers, getting feedback from the customer about quality, retraining (if required), and (maybe) eventually delivering real images.

Or, worse, to save time, come companies will simply send out documentation to their staff and pray their people can deliver the images, resulting in poor quality and endless back and forth with the customer about quality issues.

For Pixelz, training this way simply wasn’t good enough.

We wanted the ability, if need be, to train all of our staff in all locations in a matter of days and offer our biggest customers onboarding that only lasted a week or two at most. And we wanted our staff to meet our customer’s quality standards from the very first live images they worked on.

To do that, we built our own e-learning platform.

screenshot of Pixelz Academy landing page

Pixelz Academy: Scaling Retouching Training

Pixelz Academy, as we call it, is our internal e-learning platform run by our technical training team of the same name. Home to over 2,000 technical training videos and 60 courses, Pixelz Academy can provide training to any number of staff at any of our locations with as little as a few clicks of a button.

Our Academy platform is a mock-version of our real production system: training images are downloaded by our retouchers, edited, uploaded, and checked by Quality Assurance just like live images. In order to work on a new customer’s images, retouchers need to pass their training course by demonstrating they can meet our quality standards. Pixelz Academy's abilityto scale training is so powerful, it earned us a feature over at Forbes.com.

All of this means that we can have retouching capacity ready or a customer that is expecting to uploading thousands of images to us in a week or two, even if it requires training hundreds of people in different locations.

That scalability benefits our business, sure. But it also benefits our customers immensely.

Screenshot of Pixelz Academy trainer on video

Scalability, Quality, and Lightning Fast Onboarding for Customers

Though our Academy Team does their work behind the scenes, the impact they have on our customers experience in onboarding and getting started with us is game changing.

The difference between us and other retouching solutions is cut and dry: we don’t need months to onboard, train, send test images, re-clarify standards, and retrain. After just a week of two, we can have hundreds of people ready to work on your images knowing full-well that they can meet the quality standards that have helped establish Pixelz as an industry leader.

After just a week of two, we can have hundreds of people ready to work on your images knowing full-well that they can meet the quality standards that have helped establish Pixelz as an industry leader.

The combination of Academy, S.A.W.™, our AI technology, and our highly-knowledgeable onboarding teams allow Pixelz to seamlessly integrate into any creative operations in a fraction of the time of other solutions, including some of the largest fashion brands and e-commerce retailers in the world.

If you would like to see how easily Pixelz can be integrated into your own creative operations, we are currently offering 10-free images for you to test our service.