Hi there!
Welcome to the first issue of this newsletter! Every week or so I'll be sharing something practical from what I'm seeing out in the field working with product brands on their 3D pipelines. Honest observations and things you can actually use.
This month I want to talk about something I keep running into, and it's costing brands more than they realize.
Your People Are Not the Problem
Most brands I talk to think their 3D output problem is a headcount problem. They think they just don’t have enough bandwidth.
"We just need one more artist." "If we could hire another person we could finally get ahead."
I get it. The backlog is real, the demand keeps growing, and adding a person feels like the obvious solution.
But here's what I actually see when I look at how most small brand 3D teams spend their time: a big chunk of their day has nothing to do with 3D.
File management. Asset organization. Manual exports. Version tracking. Hunting down the right file because nobody set up a clear naming convention. Customizing the same asset in four different ways because each department has different requirements and nobody ever standardized them.
You hired 3D artists. But without the right pipeline around them, you end up with very expensive data wranglers.
The hard truth is that this problem doesn't get better by adding headcount. It gets better by fixing the pipeline. A new hire just inherits the same broken process and gets slowed down by it too.
It’s the Manual Stuff That Hurts
The second thing I see — and this one really gets me — is how much time small 3D teams spend manually doing work that should be automated.
Dealing with color libraries. Generating colorways. Swapping materials. Creating angle variations. Exporting different sizes and formats for ecomm, marketing, and retail.
This is repetitive, predictable work. And in most brand pipelines I've seen, a skilled 3D artist is sitting there doing it by hand, render by render.
That's wasting the talent and capabilities of the artist you hired. The talent is there. The pipeline just isn't set up to use it well.
The tools to automate this work exist, they're not exotic, and most small teams can implement them without a massive overhaul. The problem is that someone has to step back from the day-to-day long enough to actually set it up — and that rarely happens when everyone is already underwater.
Practical Action Items
Here's something practical you can do this week.
Ask your 3D team to informally track their time for one week across just three buckets:
Creating — actual 3D work, modeling, texturing, lighting, design
Rendering and exporting — generating outputs, variations, formats
Managing and organizing — file work, version tracking, admin tasks
Don't make it a formal exercise. Just ask them to keep a rough mental note and report back.
Most brand leaders are genuinely surprised by what they hear. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. That breakdown tells you more about where your pipeline needs work than any audit ever could.
If you do that exercise and want to talk through what you find, I'd genuinely love to hear it. Reply to this email or grab 30 minutes on my calendar — no agenda, just a real conversation.
Talk soon,
Barry
Barry Zundel
Founder, Flintbox Studios
[email protected]
+1 503-686-1744