The question

AI is not automatically “good” or “bad” for a brand. The more useful question is: when does its use conflict with what consumers think they are paying for?

The project examined consumer attitudes and emotions toward AI-generated imagery in fashion, including its use in product design and promotional content.

Approach

The research combined secondary research on AI use in fashion with a focus group of four fashion consumers selected to reflect differences in gender, purchasing behaviour and interest in technology.

Rather than treating attitudes toward AI as a simple positive–negative divide, I compared how participants responded to different uses of AI across product design, promotional imagery and brand communication.

What changed my view

Acceptance depended less on the technology itself than on whether AI displaced the brand’s perceived source of value.

Creativity changed the reaction.
When artistic prints, original design or collaboration were central to the product’s value, AI use triggered stronger resistance.

Context changed the reaction.
When AI acted as an auxiliary tool in promotion or non-core visual work, acceptance was more neutral if quality and brand character were maintained.

Price changed the reaction.
Consumers questioned paying a human-design premium when they believed creative or production effort had been reduced.

Implication for brands

The closer AI sits to a brand’s core creative promise, the greater the reputational risk.

Brands should therefore use AI selectively. Applications in non-core visual or promotional work may carry relatively low risk when product accuracy and brand identity are preserved. But when originality, craftsmanship or human creativity are part of what consumers believe they are paying for, AI requires a much clearer strategic justification.

The question

How do premium brands pursue short-term commercial objectives without abandoning the relationship-building communication that supports long-term brand meaning?

I compared Lululemon, Arc'teryx and Patagonia because they occupy adjacent premium lifestyle and outdoor markets while building brand meaning differently — through community, technical expertise and environmental purpose.

Research design

I manually collected and coded 344 posts across twelve brand-platform-period units.

Each post was assigned a primary communication orientation — relationship-building, functional/product-led or activation-oriented — while overlapping cues were coded separately. This allowed commercial signals inside otherwise relational or functional content to remain visible.

The headline finding

Commercial pressure did not erase brand identity. It was absorbed through it.

Relationship-building remained the dominant primary orientation across all twelve comparison units. Commercialisation appeared instead through different combinations of product visibility, activation cues and existing brand narratives.

Three brands, three commercial pathways

What this means for brands

Research boundaries

This study identifies patterns in published brand communication rather than managerial intent or consumer response. Brand positioning is therefore used as an interpretive lens, not a tested causal explanation. The sample is bounded to three brands, two platforms and two six-month periods.

Context

Kering Eyewear worked with distributor counters across multiple luxury labels. For new locations, the team assessed whether a mall and catchment justified particular brand tiers.

Round one

The first Cartier counter application was assessed using mall scale, customer demographics, location, positioning and commercial data. The evidence did not support approval, and the recommendation was to reject.

Round two

The client submitted again with new evidence: fit-out, the specific counter location and footfall information. I re-evaluated the case rather than defending the first answer.

The conclusion changed because the evidence changed.

Outcome

The challenge

How could LEMAIRE build greater relevance in China without losing the restraint and quietness that define the brand?

The challenge was not simply to add Chinese visual references, but to find a cultural idea that could feel native to both LEMAIRE and the local context.

The cultural insight

Tea offered a point of connection through ritual, tactility, materiality and a slower pace of experience — qualities that could sit naturally alongside LEMAIRE’s understated brand language.

Rather than treating tea as a decorative Chinese motif, I used it as the strategic foundation for the retail experience.

Tea was not used as a Chinese motif. It was used as a shared language of ritual, materiality and pace.

From insight to experience

I translated that idea into a Shanghai pop-up concept spanning product display, tea experience, spatial journey and owned-media activation.

The proposed experience was organised around four elements:

Commercial grounding

The concept was supported by a competitor positioning exercise comparing LEMAIRE with adjacent designer brands in China across price and popularity.

This helped situate the pop-up within the existing market rather than treating cultural relevance as a purely creative exercise.

Measuring the concept

Success would be evaluated across four areas:

What this case demonstrates

Cultural adaptation does not have to mean making a brand louder or more obviously local.

The opportunity was to identify where brand identity and cultural context already shared something, then translate that overlap into an experience that could feel locally relevant without becoming unfamiliar to the brand.

The challenge

Build creator-led demand for a skincare SKU without treating every piece of content as something worth paying to amplify.

The challenge was not simply finding more creators. It was identifying which creator–content combinations showed enough early promise to justify further investment.

The operating logic

Organic performance acted as a decision signal rather than an end metric. Stronger signals could earn amplification; every result fed the next round.

How I ran the workflow

From product to creator commerce

Real campaign evidence shows the product moving from merchandising into creator-led, shoppable content. These materials establish the commercial context without overstating attribution.

Scale

What I learned

Growth came from making the next decision better, not simply producing more creator posts.

Creator selection, organic response, paid amplification and sales review worked best as one feedback loop: each round created information for the next.

The film

How do you make a traditional craft legible without reducing it to a sequence of techniques?

The film combines observational footage, interviews and process detail to connect the physical labour of porcelain-making with the visual quality that defines Linglong porcelain: light passing through carefully worked openings in the ceramic body.

Following the process

Field shooting followed the craft through multiple stages rather than relying on a single demonstration. The resulting footage gave the edit a material rhythm: hands, rotation, drying, heat, carving and finally the finished object's relationship with light.

Material, place & detail

Building the story

The production moved from topic selection and interviews to footage classification, narrative restructuring, supplementary shooting and final editing. The aim was to let process carry information while the interview material supplied history, explanation and human context.

Watch the full film

Full documentary hosted on YouTube and embedded here for portfolio viewing.

The film

A sheet of paper looks simple. Its making is not.

The film follows Xuan paper as both a material and a cultural object: from pulp, water and coordinated handwork to drying, separating, finishing and its later use in calligraphy and painting.

Research & interviews

Interviews were used to move beyond a purely procedural film. They supplied historical context, craft knowledge and an explanation of why the process still depends on judgement, coordination and embodied skill.

Process as visual structure

The production process itself became the film's visual grammar. Repeated gestures, water, scale and the movement of paper through the workshop create continuity between explanatory sections.

From material to cultural medium

The final section shifts from manufacture toward use. Close-ups of paper, brush and surface connect industrially complex production with the quiet visual culture associated with Xuan paper.

Watch the full film

Full documentary hosted on YouTube and embedded here for portfolio viewing.

I'm interested in the point where evidence becomes a decision: why people respond differently to the same brand, when a piece of content is worth amplifying, how cultural context changes interpretation, and what that means for what a brand should do next.

That has taken me across different kinds of work. I've run creator campaigns for a DTC skincare brand, worked on store-entry decisions in luxury eyewear, studied consumer responses to generative AI, and analysed 344 social posts for my MSc dissertation. Before moving further into marketing, I trained in digital media art, where I worked with documentary film, photography and visual storytelling.

I grew up and studied in China before completing my MSc in Management with Marketing at the University of Glasgow. Working across China and the UK has made me particularly attentive to cultural context — not as a separate specialism, but as one of the things that shapes how people understand brands, products and ideas.

What connects it is simple: I work out what people respond to and why — then turn that into what a brand does next.

The question

【State the core question or decision in one strong sentence.】

Method

【How you approached it — data, method, tools.】

Finding

【The headline result and what it means.】

So what

【The decision or recommendation this led to — the part a hiring manager cares about.】