Your Best Creative Is Killing Your Conversion

In this episode, Aaron Smedley, GM of Shopify at Cloudinary, breaks down why the visual layer is one of the most underestimated operational levers in eCommerce. Drawing on his experience at Apple, Arc'teryx, and Cloudinary, he explains how asset chaos creates hidden costs, why slow pages are a management problem not a design problem, and what it actually takes to build a media system that scales.

Aaron Smedley is GM of Shopify at Cloudinary and a digital commerce operator with 15 years of experience across brands like Apple and Arc'teryx. He works at the intersection of retail operations, customer experience, and Shopify transformation, helping brands scale without sacrificing speed, consistency, or performance.

Cloudinary is a visual media platform that helps eCommerce brands manage, optimize, and deliver images and videos at scale across every channel and device.

You'll learn:
- Why visuals are an operational system, not just creative assets
- The four failure modes of poor image management
- How to start fixing your media layer without boiling the ocean
- Where AI helps and where automation matters more

Show Notes:
- (00:01:14) Meet Aaron and His Journey
- (00:03:35) Why Brands Get Visuals Wrong
- (00:06:29) Four Things to Never Do
- (00:08:22) Start Small and Systemize
- (00:10:39) The Hidden Cost of Chaos
- (00:11:48) Tools and ROI for DAM
- (00:13:39) AI vs Automation in Media
- (00:16:45) Designing for Human Behavior
- (00:19:41) Speed Without Sacrificing Beauty
- (00:20:51) Rapid Fire and Apple Lessons
- (00:23:20) Books and Final Takeaways

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