What 11,400 product images taught us about QC

Volume post-production looks like a skill problem and behaves like a process problem. Two retouchers of identical ability will produce wildly different rejection rates depending on how corrections reach them.

Verbal feedback does not survive the night shift

A note said across a desk at 4pm is gone by the next batch. We moved every rejection to an annotated frame with the reason attached — colour off swatch, path too tight at the collar, shadow direction inconsistent — and the same retoucher's rate improved without any additional training.

The gate matters more than the pipeline

One QC pass before batching, done by someone who did not do the retouching, catches the overwhelming majority of what a client would otherwise reject. It costs a fraction of a re-delivery.