E-commerce brands do not just need good looking product photos anymore. They need content that moves fast, fits every channel, and actually helps products sell. A single brand might need Amazon listing images, Shopify product page visuals, social ads, short-form video, lifestyle photos, creator content, and fresh assets for every seasonal push. That is a lot to manage, and for years, the process behind it was slow, expensive, and frustrating.
Liz Giorgi saw that problem early.
Instead of building another traditional production company, she helped build soona into something that made more sense for modern commerce. What started as a simpler way to create product photos and videos grew into a much broader platform for e-commerce brands that need to make, manage, and improve content at scale. That shift is a big reason soona stands out in a crowded market.
Liz Giorgi’s story is not just about launching a startup at the right time. It is about understanding how creative work was changing, seeing where the old system was breaking down, and building a company around what brands actually needed next.
Liz Giorgi’s background before soona
Liz Giorgi did not come into this space guessing. Before soona, she had already spent years working in media, storytelling, and production. She also built Mighteor, a video production company that worked with major brands and was later acquired. That experience mattered because it gave her a close look at how branded content was made behind the scenes.
When you work inside production long enough, you start to notice the same pain points over and over. Timelines drag out. Costs climb quickly. Communication gets messy. Smaller brands often get priced out, while larger brands still end up stuck with a process that feels heavier than it should.
That background gave Giorgi a practical advantage. She was not trying to invent demand for a flashy new tool. She had already lived inside the problem. She knew creative production could be valuable for brands, but she also knew the system around it needed to be rebuilt.
How the idea for soona came together
soona was founded by Liz Giorgi and Hayley Anderson, and the idea behind it was simple in the best way. Brands needed custom visual content, but the process for getting it done felt outdated. E-commerce was moving faster every year, yet content production still often moved like it belonged to another era.
That disconnect created a real opening.
Online brands needed quality product photos and videos without the usual friction. They needed a process that felt easier to book, easier to manage, and easier to repeat. They also needed a way to collaborate without always being physically present on set. soona stepped into that gap by making virtual content creation feel more accessible and more practical for growing merchants.
The timing helped, but timing alone does not build a lasting company. What helped even more was that the founders understood both sides of the equation. They knew the creative side, and they understood the operational side. That mix shaped soona from the beginning.
Why soona felt different from the usual content model
A lot of creative services promise quality. That is not enough on its own. The real question for e-commerce brands is whether they can get strong content without wasting time, overspending, or losing control of the process.
soona felt different because it was designed around convenience and visibility. Brands could ship products, join shoots remotely, see assets come to life, and move faster than they could with many traditional agencies or production setups. That was a meaningful shift.
The company also built appeal around transparent pricing and a more flexible model. Instead of forcing brands into a bloated production structure, soona made content creation feel more approachable. That matters for e-commerce businesses because content is not usually a one-time need. It is ongoing. A brand may need fresh visuals every month, every campaign, or every product launch.
Liz Giorgi understood that content for commerce needed to become more repeatable, not just more polished. That idea helped soona stand out.
Turning a service into a scalable e-commerce solution
One of the smartest parts of soona’s growth story is that the company did not stay boxed into its original identity.
Plenty of startups find a useful niche and stay there. soona did not. It started with virtual shoots and production services, but over time it expanded into something bigger. That move matters because e-commerce brands do not only struggle with creating content. They also struggle with organizing it, reusing it, improving it, and understanding whether it is actually helping performance.
This is where Liz Giorgi’s thinking becomes especially interesting. She did not seem content with building a company that simply delivered photos and videos. She pushed soona further into platform territory.
That meant building tools and workflows around the full content lifecycle. Make the content. Manage the assets. Measure what is working. Improve the visuals. Create more from what already exists. The moment soona became useful beyond the shoot itself, it became more valuable to e-commerce teams.
That is often the difference between a helpful service and a durable company. Services can be useful. Platforms become embedded.
How funding helped Liz Giorgi scale soona
Like many fast-growing startups, soona needed capital to expand its reach and deepen the product. The company raised seed funding early, then followed with larger rounds as demand grew and the platform matured.
Funding was not just a headline milestone here. It gave soona room to build technology, grow its team, and invest in a bigger vision. Instead of only adding more studio capacity, the company could develop software features, strengthen the customer experience, and widen the ways brands interacted with the platform.
That is an important part of Liz Giorgi’s success story. Raising money is one thing. Using that money to evolve the business model is another.
soona’s growth showed that investors could see the same shift Giorgi saw. E-commerce brands were not simply buying creative services. They were buying speed, consistency, collaboration, and better content operations.
Building soona into more than a photo and video company
This is where soona became especially relevant to modern e-commerce teams.
The company expanded beyond studio shoots into a broader creative platform with tools that support content production and performance. Today, soona is not only associated with product photography and video. It also includes features tied to AI-powered creation, listing analysis, digital asset management, competitive analysis, and integrations with e-commerce tools.
That broader product direction matters because content bottlenecks do not stop when the photos are delivered. A team still has to store assets, sort them, resize them, compare them, publish them, and figure out what should be changed next.
Liz Giorgi helped push soona into that larger role. Instead of asking brands to juggle one tool for creation, another for storage, another for optimization, and another for workflow, soona moved closer to becoming a more connected e-commerce creative system.
That made the company more than a content vendor. It made it part of how brands actually run.
Why UGC and creator content became part of the story
E-commerce content has changed dramatically over the last few years. Polished studio images still matter, but they are no longer the whole picture. Shoppers also want content that feels real, social, and native to the platforms where they spend time.
That is why user-generated content became such an important layer in the market. Brands wanted creator-led video, authentic demonstrations, product reviews, and social-first visuals that felt less like advertising and more like lived experience.
soona did not ignore that shift. It moved toward it.
That was a smart call from Liz Giorgi because it showed that the company was paying attention to how buyers actually respond to content now. Studio polish still has value, especially for product pages and marketplaces, but creator content adds a different kind of trust. A strong e-commerce brand often needs both.
By leaning into UGC, soona became more useful to brands that wanted a fuller content mix instead of a single creative format.
The role of acquisitions in soona’s expansion
Acquisitions helped speed up that expansion.
When soona acquired Trend, it strengthened its position in creator and UGC content. That deal made sense because it added a network, a workflow, and a content style that aligned with what brands increasingly wanted. It was not a random add-on. It expanded soona’s relevance.
The Mokker.ai acquisition pushed the company further into AI-assisted product imagery. That move signaled something bigger about Liz Giorgi’s direction. She was not building a business stuck in one era of e-commerce content. She was building for where the market was going.
AI is changing how brands think about variation, speed, testing, and creative production. But for most e-commerce teams, the question is not whether AI exists. The question is whether it can be useful in a real workflow. soona’s approach made that feel more practical by tying AI to actual product imagery and content needs.
That is a strong example of thoughtful expansion. The company did not chase trends for the sake of sounding modern. It added capabilities that fit the everyday work of online brands.
How Liz Giorgi balanced creativity with technology
One reason soona’s story is compelling is that it never feels like a pure software story or a pure creative story. It sits in the middle.
Liz Giorgi’s background gave her a real appreciation for creative quality, but her business decisions show a clear belief that technology should remove friction. That balance matters. If a company in this space leans too far into software, the work can feel generic. If it leans too far into traditional production, it can become slow and hard to scale.
soona’s positioning works because it tries to keep creativity and efficiency in the same conversation. Brands still want content that feels on-brand, useful, and strong enough to sell a product. They just do not want to go through a painful process every time they need it.
That is the gap Giorgi kept working on. Not replacing creativity, but making it easier to access, easier to manage, and easier to multiply across channels.
Why soona connected with e-commerce brands
soona grew because it matched the rhythm of modern e-commerce.
Online brands move quickly. They launch new products. They test new channels. They refresh listings. They create bundles. They run paid ads. They need marketplace images, social video, email assets, and seasonal campaigns. In that kind of environment, content is not a side task. It is part of the sales engine.
Liz Giorgi built soona around that reality.
The company’s appeal came from solving several pain points at once. It helped brands create content faster, collaborate more easily, and keep their visual assets organized in one place. As the platform expanded, it also gave teams more ways to analyze and improve what they were publishing.
That is a big reason soona became more than a startup with a clever idea. It became useful in the daily workflow of e-commerce brands.
Lessons entrepreneurs can take from Liz Giorgi and soona
There are several useful lessons in this story.
The first is that some of the best businesses come from problems founders know firsthand. Liz Giorgi did not pick a random industry. She built from experience.
The second is that solving one problem well can open the door to a larger platform. soona started by making content creation easier, but it grew by serving the wider needs around that content.
The third is that timing only matters if the product keeps evolving. E-commerce kept changing, and soona changed with it. It moved from virtual shoots into broader commerce content tools, creator content, and AI-assisted workflows instead of clinging to its first version.
The fourth is that growth gets stronger when a company becomes part of a system, not just part of a transaction. A brand may book one shoot once, but it is far more likely to stay when the same platform helps with storage, optimization, publishing, and ongoing creative decisions.
Liz Giorgi’s success with soona shows what can happen when a founder sees a market clearly and keeps building beyond the obvious first opportunity.
