Watch Catalogue Operations Hub

A Swiss luxury watchmaker (Geneva) needed hundreds of catalogue renders per collection, but every brief was an undocumented code string and the work ran inside a locked-down remote desktop.

Each watch variant — case material, dial colour, diamond setting — needs a studio render at 2600 × 4000 px or larger, and the largest collection runs to 240+ variants. The reference codes pack all of that into one opaque string, and the same variant could appear under three different codes depending on the folder. There was no clipboard access and no documented process.

A documented operations hub that turned an ad-hoc, in-one-person's-head process into a repeatable, auditable pipeline.

A reference decoder maps every code's four positional blocks to render specs, with a Python parser that flags unknown tokens instead of guessing. A workflow layer standardises how jobs arrive, get briefed, and get delivered. A scripted pipeline runs the rendering and compositing — all backed by an engagement history readable cold by anyone who takes over.

A Python batch pipeline composites a full 240-variant collection in under 5 minutes — work that was previously manual and days long.

An AutoHotkey autotyper types scripts character-by-character into the remote desktop, bypassing the clipboard block. The Blender renderer chains scenes through a render_complete handler and timer, staying stable under heavy Cycles loads where a naive loop deadlocks the UI. A CSV-driven compositor then stacks the case, numbers, and hands layers into finished PNGs, resumable via lock-files if interrupted.

When the contract resumed after a 14-month gap, the full context was available on day one — no discovery phase.

Every fact lives in one Markdown file, tagged Confirmed / Draft / Placeholder so nothing unverified gets promoted silently. The engagement history is a dated audit trail of every rate change, milestone, and open risk. A successor designer can read the hub cold and take over a collection without three weeks of rediscovery.

~290 photorealistic renders delivered across 4 collections — and the cost per variant dropped sharply once the automation was in place.

The largest collection ran to ~240 variants, where the batch pipeline made the work cost-efficient; a later collection reused the same scene setup almost for free. 61 documents and 758 lines of Python make up the hub itself — the deliverable that makes re-engagement cheap and any handoff clean.