NYC jewelry designer Shahla boosts her efficiency with the QuickBooks ecosystem

Intuit needed customer testimonial videos for QuickBooks Online Advanced. Real business owners, real stories, and enough product specificity to be useful, without the whole thing feeling like an ad. They brought in Gorilla Creative, a corporate video production company in San Francisco, to run the project end to end, starting with finding the customers.

The series featured three businesses in three cities and produced six long form videos, twelve social cut-downs, three thank-you videos, and a library of photography for each customer. This one was filmed with Shahla Karimi, a fine jewelry brand in New York City built around recycled metals, ethically sourced stones, and custom pieces made from a client's own story. Founder Shahla Karimi runs the company on the full QuickBooks ecosystem and describes it as the reason she gets to spend her time designing.

The Challenge

In fine jewelry the payments are large and the timing is tight. A customer says yes, and the stone has to be bought before the moment passes. Waiting four or five days for funds to clear is a real constraint on a small business working at that price point.

Cash flow is abstract until you attach it to something specific. Told generally it's a topic. Told through a designer standing in the Diamond District deciding whether she can buy a stone today, it's a story.

Intuit's brief asked for exactly that across the whole series. Not just what the software does, but what it lets someone actually do, and ideally showing the payoff rather than describing it.

Our Approach

Customer recruiting was part of our scope, which is a bit unusual for a video production company and is the part of this project where our experience delivered the most impact, long before we ever picked up a camera. We ran an email outreach campaign to QuickBooks Online Advanced customers, screened interest with a short questionnaire, then took twelve businesses through discovery calls about how they use the product and how their companies came to be. We wrote a brief on each one, pulled two or three usable quotes from every conversation so Intuit got value even from businesses we never filmed, and recommended the three that would make the best videos.

It's closer to casting than sourcing. We were weighing story, product use, how someone comes across on camera, and whether the business would look like anything on screen, all at once.

With the three customers selected for the series, we built a discussion guide for each from their discovery call, sent a preparation guide so nobody felt unprepared on the day, and filmed each business over two days on location. Two full length videos came out of every shoot, along with the social cut-downs and stills.

For this one we filmed for the payoff. That meant filming the parts of her day the interview was going to reference, in her studio and out in the Diamond District, so the finished video could show the thing instead of explaining it.

The production stayed light everywhere. A small crew, our core team traveling with local hires filling out the rest in each city, and schedules built so no single session ran long enough to wear anyone out. For a founder who is the designer, the salesperson, and the operator, protecting her time is part of the job.

Editing, color grading, sound design, and photo retouching were all overseen by the same producer and director who started the first conversation with our client, ensuring no detail was ever lost in handoff between phases of the project that spanned more than six months.

The Outcome

Intuit got a video about money that doesn't feel like a video about money. The stakes are concrete, the person on camera is describing her own week, and the product sits where it belongs, in the middle of a business that would run differently without it.

Across the series we delivered six long form customer testimonial videos, twelve social cut-downs, three thank-you videos, and photography for all three businesses, filmed in New York, Colorado, and Alaska. We ran every phase of it, from the first outreach email to the final export, and Intuit never had to source a customer, chase a release, or manage a shoot.