Somewhere between the third retailer's spec sheet and the fifth platform's content calendar, most beauty brands hit a wall: The team that built their identity in one or two channels now has to figure out how to carry that same identity everywhere it needs to show up.
That pressure has only gotten heavier. McKinsey’s June 18, 2026, State of Beauty report says that in the United States, Amazon and TikTok’s combined core beauty sales could surpass the combined sales of Sephora and Ulta Beauty in 2026.
For brands, each channel brings its own specifications, content cadence, and version of the same question: Does this still sound like us?
View Imaging built its business on the other side of that wall. For two decades, the New York–based creative-production partner has helped beauty brands manage the growing complexity of producing consistent content across channels.
View Imaging began in 2006 with Peter Rundqvist, an early pioneer of digital retouching whose career included a longtime collaboration with photographer Peter Lindbergh at Harper's Bazaar. Peter built the craft. Marissa Bennett, who joined in 2016 and now serves as CEO, created the model to scale it. Together, they grew a single retoucher's studio into a full-service creative-production partner, producing thousands of digital assets a year for clients like Sephora, Laneige, e.l.f. Beauty, Grown Alchemist, Restoration Hardware, and Spanx.
Rather than being built around a service line, View Imaging's model is staying embedded with a brand's in-house team long enough to think like one of them. Brands juggling multiple retailers, paid and organic content simultaneously, and an always-on publishing cadence often find that a rotating production roster can introduce different voices, quality levels, and a lack of institutional knowledge each time a new collaborator is brought in. View Imaging's approach is to become an embedded partner that retains context, brand integrity, and stewardship, and catching inconsistencies even as internal teams change. For many clients, View Imaging's role is to stay invisible. “In these instances, we become the gray man,” Leah Muhlenfeld, Head of Strategic Partnerships and Client Success at View Imaging, said, with the win being work indistinguishable from what an in-house team would produce. For others, the brief is the opposite: Brands such as Laneige bring View Imaging in for its creative point of view, from concepting through full campaigns.
"We're a creative-production partner built on top of process versus trying to figure out a process for the creative," Muhlenfeld said. In practice, that means View Imaging invests early in understanding a brand's identity, style guidelines, and internal pain points. That also includes managing style guide updates, tracking version control, and flagging when a brand's own team has drifted from a decision made two rounds earlier, before ever touching the creative itself. That layer of process is what the company calls "creative production strategy.” Distinct from brand strategy or creative strategy, it's the operational layer that decides how the work gets made, reviewed, and shipped.
That process-first approach by design becomes increasingly valuable at scale. "If you want scale, you've got to have systems, and you really want to have the same consistent team," Bennett said. Brands managing multiple retail channels, each with its own specs and requirements, often find that scaling content isn't just a matter of producing more; it's a matter of producing more consistently, without the brand's identity fragmenting across platforms.
Output volume isn’t the sole goal. The value proposition is the ability to build systems and shared context that let an in-house team spend less time managing production logistics and more time on strategy and creative direction. That shift doesn't happen on day one: Senior team members spend the first stretch of a new engagement mapping workflows and calibrating systems, and the efficiency shows up once those systems are in place and running on their own. It’s the difference between the first few months of a relationship and the version of it that's been in motion for a year.
Not every brand needs this kind of relationship yet. But a few patterns tend to show up when a brand is ready for a collaborative partnership.
When those pressure points begin to compound, View Imaging's model is built for what comes next: a smaller pilot project, typically an eight-week engagement, that lets both sides test the workflow before committing to the long-term relationship the partner is designed to support. In week one, that can start with a kickoff brief, which View Imaging's team reviews and returns within 24 to 48 hours, flagging any gaps. These can include a missing reference or incomplete asset link before the core production work begins.
Even as production scales, View Imaging leans into the idea that taste, not automation, keeps content from blurring into sameness. That standard traces back to founder Peter Rundqvist's background as a retoucher; but what sets the creative-production partner apart today is that his standard became the View Imaging standard, carried by the team he trained rather than resting on any one person. That extends to how the team uses AI. It’s treated as a tool for efficiency, not a shortcut around the taste and quality control applied to every asset before it ships.
While View Imaging's client list includes major retail names, the model is not reserved for brands with unlimited budgets. Muhlenfeld said the creative-production partner works with a range: “It's more about consistency and long-term viability than having a giant budget.” Bennett shared a similar perspective: “I really do love a passionate founder who has a strong identity and knows what they want.”
A founder-led or fast-growing brand can be as strong a fit as a much larger one, especially when its growth strategy depends on scaling quickly and it needs to build the scaffolding that will hold as it grows.
The brands that get past the wall aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the biggest internal teams. They’re the ones that recognize, before the pressure becomes unmanageable, that more channels require more than just more assets. They require a shared system for protecting the brand as the work moves from a hero campaign to retail pages, paid social, creator content, and whatever platform comes next.
That is why an initial pilot project is key. It gives a brand and a creative-production partner room to test the workflow, establish the standards, and decide whether the relationship can support the always-on work ahead. Rather than build another layer around an in-house team, the goal is to help that team keep the brand recognizable—on the other side of the wall, wherever it appears.
