Northwind Retail · Creative automation

A brand engine that designs itself.

Northwind Retail runs campaigns across 240 stores in 6 countries. We replaced a production bottleneck with a generative design system that turns one set of brand rules into thousands of ready-to-publish assets.

ClientNorthwind Retail
IndustryRetail & E-commerce
Year2025
Timeline14 weeks
ServicesAI design · Software
Atlas
01 — The challenge

240 stores, one overloaded studio.

Every weekly promotion needed banners, shelf labels, social posts and in-store screens — in four languages and dozens of formats. An external agency produced them manually: six days of turnaround, rising costs, and a brand that slowly drifted apart across markets.

Northwind needed volume without losing control of its visual identity — and without growing the marketing team.

02 — The solution

Brand rules, compiled to pixels.

We encoded Northwind's identity — grids, typography, colour logic, photography style — into a design system that machines can execute. A fine-tuned diffusion model generates campaign imagery; a layout engine assembles every format; brand-compliance checks run on each asset before a human ever sees it.

Marketers enter an offer once. Atlas produces the whole campaign — and routes edge cases to a designer for approval.

What we built

  • Generative visual engine fine-tuned on the brand's art direction
  • Layout compiler producing 40+ formats from one master
  • Automated brand-compliance scoring on every asset
  • Approval workflow with one-click designer overrides
  • Direct publishing to DAM, e-commerce and in-store screens
03 — The results

Production stopped being the bottleneck.

Within one quarter, campaign turnaround dropped from six days to four hours and external production spend fell by almost three quarters — while brand consistency, measured by the compliance score, went up.

10k+assets / month
−74%production cost
4 hrscampaign turnaround
6markets covered
“Atlas does in an afternoon what used to take our agency a week. The surprising part is that the brand looks more consistent, not less.”
Marta KellerMarketing Operations Director · Northwind Retail
04 — Tech stack
PythonPyTorchStable Diffusion (fine-tuned)ReactNode.jsPostgreSQLAWSS3 + CloudFront