Let’s Address the Elephant in the Room, Shall We? 🐘
If you’ve spent any time looking around Tallulahs, there’s probably something fairly obvious we should talk about.
Yes. Some of our campaign imagery is AI-generated.
There. We said it!
We could probably dress that up in lots of clever language about technology and creative tools, but that wouldn’t really be us.The truth is much simpler.
We’re a tiny business with very big plans
Tallulahs is at the very beginning.
We’d absolutely love to spend our days on beaches and beside lakes, photographing every new swimsuit on real people, chasing the sunshine and creating beautiful campaigns somewhere by the sea.
Believe us! We would really, really love that to be the job.
But right now...
We’re still working to fund this dream.
There are bills to pay. There’s work to do. There are families, responsibilities, long days and all the completely ordinary bits of adult life that don’t suddenly disappear because you’ve decided to chase another dream.
So Tallulahs is being built around all of that.
In the evenings.
At weekends.
In the gaps.
In notebooks, on laptops and in ideas that have had hours to turn themselves over on long journeys before finally being written down at the next stop.
It isn’t particularly glamorous.
But it is real.
So where does AI come into it?
Right now, AI gives us a way to take some of the ideas in our heads and actually show them to you.
The colours. The energy. The ridiculous fun. The beaches. The adventures. The world we imagine Tallulahs becoming.
It means that a very small business without a very large campaign budget can start creating something before it has all the resources it hopes to have one day.
But here's the important bit:
It isn't where we want to be.
We want real people wearing Tallulahs.
Real photographers.
Real beaches and lakes.
Real holidays.
Real bodies.
Windblown hair. Belly rolls. Dodgy tan lines. Actual life. Because that is what Tallulahs is supposed to be about.
And we want this dream to help fund other dreams
One of the things we'd really love, if Tallulahs grows, is for that growth to create opportunities for other people too.
We want to pay photographers.
Work with real people.
Collaborate with other small businesses.
Put real people in front of the camera who actually connect with what Tallulahs is about.
Maybe, eventually, this little dream of ours gets to help somebody else chase one of theirs.
That would be pretty special.
But we aren't going to pretend we're already at that point.
We're starting where we are.
Which is actually so on brand!
Yesterday, we talked about Younger You Had Plans. About remembering the girl who thought her life was going to be full of adventures before adulthood arrived with bills, responsibilities, deadlines and a million reasons to put things off until “one day”. And the funny thing is, we're having to take our own advice.
We could wait. Wait until there’s a huge marketing budget. Wait until we can organise the perfect photoshoot. Wait until we have more time. Wait until everything looks exactly how we imagined it.
Or we can start with what we have and work towards what we want.
So that's what we're doing.
We're still working to fund the dream while trying not to forget why we started dreaming in the first place.
And somewhere underneath all the grown-up practicalities, we're still trying to hear that younger voice saying:
Go on.
Try it.
Build it.
See where it goes.
So, stick with us
If AI imagery isn’t particularly your thing, we understand. It's not our thing either. But we hope you'll stick around long enough to see where this goes.
Because behind those images is a very real little business.
Real people.
Real lives.
Real responsibilities.
And some fairly enormous plans.
We're building Tallulahs one step at a time, and as we grow, we hope you'll see more and more of the real world we always intended Tallulahs to become.
This is just the beginning.
Younger you had plans.
She dreamed big. Don’t let her down.
💕 Tallulahs
#TeamTallulahs