Studio Rx (IPG Health) — Firefly Custom Model & Brand Character System · 2025
The Rxies
When Studio Rx rebuilt its brand identity around a cast of characters called the Rxies, leadership tasked me with mastering Adobe Firefly's newly-launched Custom Models feature, training the model, and rolling it out network-wide. Featured in Adobe's official Firefly customer case study; the approach behind it powered a month-long, network-wide campaign I led called RexieWeen.
Challenge
When Studio Rx set out to rebuild its brand identity around a new cast of characters, the Rxies, its parent network IPG Health wanted to prove out Adobe Firefly's then-new Custom Models feature as a real production tool, not just a demo. Leadership tasked me with learning the technology fast enough to build a working custom model and put it to use on a live campaign, then take it from a one-person experiment to something the entire studio, across every market, could pick up and use on its own.
Approach
I trained Firefly on the studio's initial set of Rxie illustrations to build a custom model that could generate new poses, environments, and scenes for the characters while holding onto their exact look and personality, the same model Studio Rx's Executive Creative Director later credited with retaining "the personality and style of our artist's work in the finished images." Once the model worked, I built a workshop deck and ran a lunch-and-learn to train the studio, then published the model for every employee on the network to access. I followed that by leading RexieWeen, a month-long campaign posting a new Rxie every day in October, sourced from designers across the network (including our Brazil studio) with me running quality control in the background: generating variations and retouching submissions to bring each one up to a consistent bar before it went live.
Impact
The rebrand and custom model were covered in Adobe's official Firefly customer case study, which credited the approach with a 5x speed increase over the studio's previous process: over 20 finished Rxie assets delivered in 10 days, down from what would have taken months by hand. The custom model I trained and rolled out became a standing studio-wide tool that's still in active use today, and RexieWeen turned that into a real adoption story: designers across the network using a tool I taught them, at a volume and pace none of us could have hit manually.
