Case Study
Carl Wilkinson
Co-Owner of Locol Design
From line art to a finished, client-ready video in half an hour
Carl Wilkinson has spent two decades in footwear design, with roles at Adidas, Lacoste and Puma, where he headed up the team sport design teams. In 2020 he left to co-found Locol Design - a footwear design and sourcing agency. Carl and his team give smaller footwear and fashion brands the same access to design expertise and supply chain that bigger companies have.
Locol Design runs a UK-based design and development team alongside a sourcing team in Vietnam that sits directly with factories. Carl uses NewArc across the full process, from early ideation through to the assets that go in front of clients, investors and suppliers.
Carl uses NewArc to get to a finished concept faster, and put more options on the table.
Footwear design used to mean long rounds of Photoshop rendering. Creating a few photorealistic images from different views could take Carl two to three days, only for a client to ask for a change and send him back to redo it.
With NewArc, that same output takes 10 minutes to half an hour. That speed changes what's possible earlier in the process: more colorways, more tooling ideas, and more rounds of feedback before anything goes to sample.
“What was taking 2 or 3 days can now take 10 minutes, or half an hour.”
Better assets mean better decisions, sooner
Many of Locol Design's clients are founders and smaller brands without a product background, so a technical CAD drawing doesn't always land. A photorealistic render does.
Carl uses NewArc to show a shoe from every angle, as a spinning 3D animation, and even in use, such as on a runner mid-stride, so clients understand the finished product long before it's made.
That clarity carries through to manufacturing too. Giving suppliers realistic renders earlier in the process, alongside the usual back-and-forth on materials and colour, speeds up the conversation on both sides.
“Being able to show them a photorealistic render, and a 360 render so they can see it at all angles, is really beneficial. They can make more informed choices at a sooner part of the process.”
AI as a Tool for Inspiration
Carl's advice for anyone starting out with AI tools: keep prompts simple, change one thing at a time, and give the tool room to surprise you.
He finds designers get the best results when they stop trying to fully art-direct every output and instead treat NewArc as a source of options to react to and refine, not as a direct replacement for Photoshop or Illustrator.
“It's more about giving designers the space and the autonomy to think, and not be so pigeonholed in what they want - allow it to open up your mind.”
See Carl's Workflow
Watch Carl take a running shoe from line art through to a finished render, colourway options, a spin animation and a use-case video
“In the space of 30 minutes we've taken a line art form from photorealistic render of all views, animate it and show use cases. It would have taken multiple people a week or so to do this before this tool was available.”
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