How Borderlessbutter saved 6 hrs/week on product photos with SecretSauce
Arden Zhuo is the founder of Borderlessbutter, an artisanal butter brand based in Singapore.
Arden runs Borderlessbutter alongside her full time job, so time is the one thing she can't afford to waste. She handles everything herself - the ideas, the content, the campaigns, the posting - but product photography was taking up a disproportionate amount of her time. Until SecretSauce.
The product photography problem
Artisanal food brands sell on sensory details: the texture of the product, the richness of the color, the sense that something was made by hand rather than a factory. That’s what makes someone stop scrolling and want to try something they've never tasted. But they're also the hardest things to capture on camera.
Arden was doing all her own product photography. Getting her artisanal butter to look right on camera meant experimenting with lighting, backgrounds, and styling - then reshooting until something works and editing in post production.
"It was eating 6 hours a week I didn't have, and the results never looked as polished as the product deserved."
A professional photo shoot wasn't in the budget. So the hours kept adding up.
Saving 6 precious hours a week
Arden came across SecretSauce and decided to test it for her Lunar New Year campaign.
Instead of spending most of a weekend setting up shots that might not deliver, she added her website URL, which and described the holiday vibe she was going for.
SecretSauce learns from your actual product and brand identity - so what came back wasn't just polished, it was recognizably Borderlessbutter, campaign-ready and on-brand without a single reshoot.
"I get consistent, on-brand, beautiful visuals, without the budget for an editorial shoot. I used it for my Lunar New Year campaign, built out holiday-specific assets, and what used to take most of a weekend now took 2 hours."
Putting time back into the business
Six hours a week back is significant when you're running a business on the side. For Arden, that time went straight into growing Borderlessbutter - including getting started with Meta ads to reach more people with the better content she was now producing.
