Cecilia Pidgeon founded Miss Cecilia, a London-based demi-fine jewelry brand, with £500 in 2023. She’s since grown the business to nearly £500K in annual turnover within three years, using Photoroom for background removal, product fixing, batch editing, and AI product video creation. Photoroom contributed to a 50% increase in sales after she standardized her product visuals and cut photo editing time for 20 images from a full day to seconds. This story is for solo e‑commerce founders, jewelry brand owners, and scaling businesses that need professional product photos without a photography team or studio budget.
Life before Photoroom
Inconsistent product backgrounds across the website
20 photos took a full day to edit manually
Growing catalog and 400 photos per campaign to edit
No budget for a studio or videographer
Solo founder doing design, photography, and sales
Life with Photoroom
50% sales increase after standardizing visuals
Approaching £500K annual turnover in year three
£60K in revenue in a single Christmas month
20 photos edited in seconds with Batch
Product Fixer fixed lighting and product fidelity
Every product background matches perfectly
AI videos created without outsourcing
"Photoroom helps me make my product photos reflect exactly what the customer will receive. Trust is very important, and the good pictures I create in Photoroom build that trust between my business and my customers."
— Cecilia Pidgeon, Founder and Creative Director, Miss Cecilia
In 2023, Cecilia Pidgeon launched Miss Cecilia, a London-based demi-fine jewelry brand made for modern women who value style, quality, and versatility. She started with a £500 budget, designed her first collection, built the website, found retail partners, and ran the entire operation solo for over two years.
"To start a business by yourself is never easy," she shares. "I spent ten days from 8 am to 10 pm building the website. At that time, we didn't have AI. I had to Google everything."
Before Miss Cecilia, Cecilia worked as a fashion editor and stylist at Condé Nast for over a decade, and she saw firsthand how valuable visuals are for selling fashion pieces. So, after launching her business, she enrolled in a photography class to shoot products herself.
But learning to take a good photo was only part of it. An e‑commerce brand demands high-quality, consistent visuals across every product and channel at a fast pace. Producing these visuals in large volumes of 400 photos for new launches was a challenge no class could have prepared her for.
More products, more challenging jewelry product photography
Whenever Cecilia took photos of new jewelry, small changes in lighting would shift the background color. The photos weren't bad, but they fell short of the polished, elevated feel her demi-fine pieces deserved.
"When I tried to upload the product images onto the website, they really didn't look good if the backgrounds were different," she recalls.
As the catalog grew, so did the problems of inconsistency. Each collection adds 14 or more new products that need distinct product shots, model images, and retail-ready photos across multiple angles. Keeping backgrounds consistent across hundreds of these images shot under different photographic conditions got harder as the product range expanded.
Cecilia spent a lot of time manually fixing images. "It would cost me a full day just to make the background color the same for twenty photos," she shares. For a solo founder also designing collections, managing retail partnerships, and running other parts of the business, that time simply didn't exist.
She also needed video content for Instagram Reels, which she says consistently outperforms static images on the platform. But hiring a videographer would cost thousands of pounds she didn't have. And videos were just one piece of it. Between lifestyle images, product photos, social content, and newsletter visuals, the creative workload never let up.
"The hard part of running my business is producing creative content continuously. That's the hardest part, and it would cost thousands of pounds to hire a videographer or somebody to create the volume of visuals I need.”
— Cecilia Pidgeon, Founder and Creative Director, Miss Cecilia
Without an editing team or a bigger budget, she started looking for a tool that could solve the most basic problem first: making the background of every product image the same.
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Jewelry product images with inconsistent image backgrounds from early days of Miss Cecilia. Source: Miss Cecilia
Removing image inconsistency with a complete creative toolkit
Cecilia found Photoroom through a Google search before generative AI became mainstream. What drew her in was how directly the solution addressed her priority: background consistency.
"I found Photoroom when AI tools like ChatGPT weren’t a thing, and the app really helped me to create the same image background for my items. I use a little bit of grey mixed with beige for my backgrounds, which can be tricky to get right. Photoroom made that consistent across all products.”
— Cecilia Pidgeon, Founder and Creative Director, Miss Cecilia
Today, she uses the Photoroom app as her full creative toolkit, handling everything from editing 10-20 images daily to preparing 200-plus photos for each new collection. During launches, she processes around 400 photos per week.
Cecilia’s best-used features in the Photoroom toolkit
These are the Photoroom tools in her workflow:
Background Remover: Her starting point, which erases the original background from every product image in one step.
Background color changer: Sets her custom grey-beige background color across the full catalog.
Flat Lay: Converts product photos into clean, professional flat-lay images. She uploads a photo and gets a studio-quality result she can customize with any background color.
Product Fixer: Fixes small imperfections in product images using a brush tool, from a necklace clasp that didn't render correctly to fine details that need adjusting.
Batch: Her favorite feature, which processes hundreds of photos at once for backgrounds, shadows, and more.
AI videos: Creates video content for her products. She uploads a product photo, picks a template, and the tool creates a video for her social media or website.
Above is an AI product video created for Miss Cecilia. Source: Miss Cecilia
Keeping product photos true to life
Cecilia also relies on Photoroom to retain the true nature of products in images. As she shares, "When I use general-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT, it doesn't always get the photo right. So I still upload it to Photoroom, use the Product Fixer tool, and it quickly fixes the picture for me."
For a jewelry brand where customers can't try pieces on before buying, that accuracy matters. If a product photo doesn't match what arrives in the box, it affects brand credibility and customer trust.
"I'm not really a tech person, but Photoroom is easy to use. I've been creating with the app for three years already, and I just keep using it for my product photos. It's convenient and keeps my products accurate in every photo."
— Cecilia Pidgeon, Founder and Creative Director, Miss Cecilia
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Example of a bracelet product image Cecilia edited using Photoroom’s Product Fixer tool. The “Before” image (left) has inadequate lighting that doesn’t fully capture the true nature of the product. The “After” image (right) shows the product reflects her product in the lighting, reflections and tones. Cecilia used Photoroom’s Product Fixer to fix the small details of the lighting. Source: Miss Cecilia
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An original model shot of Miss Cecilia’s earring (left) turned into a flat lay photo (right) using the Photoroom Flat Lay tool. Source: Miss Cecilia
A six-figure brand built on better visuals
Since adopting Photoroom, Miss Cecilia has grown from a small business into one that has:
Increased sales by 50% after using Photoroom to standardize product image backgrounds across the website.
Gained £60K in revenue during a single Christmas month, with sales tripling year over year.
Reached almost £500K in annual turnover within three years of launching with £500.
Reduced photo editing time from a full day to seconds for 20 images using batch editing.
Saved thousands of pounds by adopting AI product photography tools instead of hiring a videographer.
Cecilia has also grown her team by hiring two part-time employees and expanded her business beyond its website, stocking Miss Cecilia's products at Wolf & Badger, Not On The High Street, and boutique shops across the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe. This growth has changed how she describes her business today:
"I don't say my brand is small anymore. It’s not very big yet, but it’s doing way better than a small business would. That’s why the visuals I use on social media, the website, and email newsletters are very important to me at this stage. Fashion is a visual industry, and the industry is watching."
— Cecilia Pidgeon, Founder and Creative Director, Miss Cecilia
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Earring product image. Original photo (left) and Photoroom-edited photo (right). Source: Miss Cecilia
From a growing brand to a scaling business
When asked for her advice for new business owners who want to grow their businesses as fast as she did, Cecilia points to mindset and skill set. "There's an English word, resilience. I think that's the most important thing,” she shares. “You need willpower to finish each project, and you should always be learning new skills."
Cecilia intends to take both values into the future of her business, with plans to double or triple her £60K Christmas revenue this coming season and expand Miss Cecilia into accessories, sunglasses, and fashion lines in a few years. Each new category means more products to shoot, edit, and list, and the visual workload only grows from here.
As a founder who's also the creative director, that makes time the resource she protects most. And so she advises other entrepreneurs to adopt AI for product photography to buy back time for more strategic business tasks.
"Your time is the most important thing, especially as a founder. Your time is very much related to how your business grows. So, I definitely encourage businesses scaling production to use Photoroom for visuals. It’s easy to use, creates great results, and saves you time."
— Cecilia Pidgeon, Founder and Creative Director, Miss Cecilia
Photoroom is the AI product photography platform that helps e‑commerce businesses create professional visuals at every stage of growth. For Miss Cecilia, that meant turning inconsistent product shots taken in a spare room into a visual identity that supports six-figure sales and global retail partnerships.
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