Aishwarya Iyer founded Brightland in 2018 after learning how much of the olive oil on shelves was rancid or adulterated. She started working with small family farms in California, and wrapped their oils in bottles that looked like art. The first batch sold out within a week. Today, Brightland's olive oils, vinegars, and honeys are some of the most recognizable bottles in the pantry aisle, and on Instagram.

November and December are the most important months of Brightland's year. Holiday gifting drives a huge share of the business, and the creative has to match the moment. This year, the marketing team behind it was three people.

Brightland had just wrapped a shoot with roughly 1,000 new images. About 100 selects needed to be reviewed, labeled, sized, and retouched before the campaign could launch.

For four weeks, Air creative producer Lou Castonguay embedded with the team, working in Brightland's workspace alongside Air. Air tagged more than 5,000 assets with the right product names through an automation, so every bottle was findable by what it actually was.

The hero product shots were resized for every orientation the campaign needed. Lou built a template design with roughly 100 variations for the team to choose from, and produced a holiday set of 30 ads, email GIFs, and retouched images for the photo library. The team stayed in charge of the creative. Air handled the volume.

Brightland is known for stillness: beautiful bottles, beautifully lit. This season, it added motion. Using Canvas, the team turned product photography into animations for social and, for the first time, for the website. The site relaunch was the final push.

Her takeaway: the flashiest AI gets the headlines, but the work that really helps a small team ship beautiful creative is the unglamorous production work underneath it.

For Aishwarya, the payoff was a holiday season her small-but-might team could keep pace with.

Watch the film above to see how the campaign came together, from the first selects to the finished site.