An Exclusive Peek Inside Studio Orange, Home Depot's Hushed New Content-Producing Workshop

Rigby is on a freelance gig. His day job is sniffing out cadavers for the police department, but today, the frisky retriever is on a soundstage in front of a camera. In a few minutes, a bunch of kids will kick off a taco party. Rigby’s only job is to look cute—and not eat the tacos. Sophie, the stylist, has her doubts. “He went after my breakfast in two seconds,” she sighed. “I’m very worried.” At first blush, you might guess that this is a film set in L.A. or perhaps a magazine shoot in Manhattan. It’s neither. We’re in North Carolina—at Home Depot. Specifically, we’re at Studio Orange, a hitherto shrouded enterprise that Home Depot established early in 2024 and has agreed to let a reporter in to see. Studio Orange isn’t just significant for what it is—a colossal facility equipped to produce nearly any creative asset a marketing department could want—but for what it represents. Home Depot’s aim is to create a lot more marketing content and do most of it with in-house talent. Today’s shoot calls for the kids to make a cheese-and-guac-filled mess all over vinyl flooring from Lifeproof, a Home Depot house brand. Historically, the responsibility for staging a set, hiring a photographer, and booking kids and a dog would fall to an agency. But Studio Orange is going it alone. Company officials say that the enterprise will not only reduce costs and streamline production but also enhance the brand’s standing, making it more appealing to Gen-Z consumers who are, after all, the homeowners of tomorrow. “If we're using agencies to create this content, there's only so much you can do because it gets too expensive,” said Talitha Wiles, Studio Orange’s director of marketing operations. “This [facility] came along at a fantastic time to [produce] content at scale, at a reasonable cost, that you can control.” An unexpected opportunity Studio Orange’s building really did just come along. Until recently, the 240,000-square-foot facility—including staging areas, carpentry shop, and a dizzying array of props—belonged to Alderman Studios. For 125 years, the family business had photographed dressers, chests, and dining sets for the furniture makers that once filled this part of North Carolina. Studio Orange still exudes its original, late '60s vibe. But as inexpensive furniture imported from China flooded the market, many of those makers disappeared. About a year ago, the Aldermans—who’d already counted Home Depot as a client—decided to get out, too. And suddenly, there it was: a fully equipped production facility on 18 acres of land and a seasoned staff to go with it. “The immense space… paired with the knowledge of the tenured associates isn’t something we could have just built,” Home Depot CMO Molly Battin told ADWEEK. “Studio Orange was a unique unexpected opportunity that we were lucky to take advantage of.” Stacie Santana, Home Depot’s senior director of marketing operations, added that Home Depot would have been “remiss” had it failed to acquire the studio. “This was one of the fastest acquisitions we’ve ever done,” she said. And, arguably, among the nerviest. Battin wouldn’t reveal the price tag for Studio Orange but clearly “it’s a massive capital expenditure,” ventured Thomas Ordahl, a brand-development veteran who spent 13 years as Landor’s chief strategy officer before founding his own consultancy. “It’ll be years before they [realize] whatever savings they’re getting,” he suggested. Economies of scale On a recent afternoon, the scale of corporate’s commitment to Studio Orange is evident. Men in overalls stood atop ladders to string cable for a new server room. A warren of interior spaces has already been transformed into a suite for editing and post-production, a screening room, makeup and wardrobe, and even an “ideation room” complete with a pool table. The doors that haven’t been repainted in Pantone 165 (Home Depot orange) soon will be. Together with the 30 Alderman employees it hired, Home Depot maintains a full-time staff of 65 people—producers and photographers, designers and lighting techs, riggers, carpenters, and electricians. Studio Orange harkens back to the days of the Hollywood studio system in which everyone and everything required to make a film worked on the same lot. A dolly shot in progress for the recent Home Decorate Awareness campaign. It’s easy to see how a spread this lavish can produce a wide range of marketing material. Harder to discern is how it’ll save money. Yet the economies of scale are here. A corkboard in the main corridor features photos of creative staff clustered below the shoots scheduled for the next three days. Teams are in constant rotation through 25-30 weekly projects. The 7-person crew assigned to the Everbuilt shower video today will move over to a cabinetry shoot tomorrow. Professional models? There are few. Most people in the shots are what officials call “friends and family talent”—ordinary folks who look “relatable” to customers. In fact, only the trained animals have agents. (It will take Rigby the dog, one pig, a llama, and a baby cow to demonstrate the resiliency of Lifeproof flooring.) But physical size seems to be the principal advantage. Studio Orange is in fact five studios, each so cavernous that entire houses can be erected inside, their roof beams slung from the roof trusses overhead. Living rooms, kitchens, and bathrooms in various states of assembly loom in the shadows. Three garage sets sit ready for shoots featuring riding mowers and tools. A soundstage contracted by an advertising agency would build, use, and then tear down a set within days. “They can’t keep your stuff up forever,” Wiles said. But here, “we can keep it up for as long as we want.” Once the in-house carpenters and decorators finish a set, it can—with a bit of stage management—serve indefinitely. Studio Orange’s senior manager of creative production Jennifer Hudson shows off one set that’s between takes. A few days ago, it was a living room featuring a Home Depot sofa, rug, and lighting fixtures. Photographers snapped off all the needed assets—product shots and silhouettes for the website, lifestyle shots for social media, vanity pics for in-store signage, and so on—and then another team moved in. After adding a wall and sliding in a checkerboard floor, the set became an entryway for a shoot highlighting a hall tree. And then the set mutated a third time. “We need to shoot a video of a young woman organizing her closet,” Hudson explained. “So the entry door goes away, an interior door goes in its place and we make a closet.” Studio Orange inherited—and uses—a century's worth of old Alderman props. Home of the house brands It’s no coincidence that the featured products in these shots are nearly all Home Depot private-label brands. Home Depot wants its house brands to have the same relevance and appeal that national brands enjoy; Studio Orange will streamline that effort. A marketing and art direction team in the Atlanta headquarters will select the products to be featured and conceptualize the shoots, then turn it over to the Studio Orange team to stage it all. One private-label brand will typically take center stage, but the shoots are also models of cross-promotion. For instance, the set built as a den features a caramel brown midcentury modern sofa by StyleWell (a Home Depot brand) as its hero product. But there’s also a gold metal coffee table from Home Decorators Collection (another Home Depot brand) and a wall covered in walnut Art3D wall panels—a national brand. The featured product, Wiles said, will be “paired with other private-brand products in the set to bring the whole thing together. It’s a story.” Aware of Studio Orange’s ability to create images with high production value, Home Depot also hopes to turn the facility into a revenue stream with a pilot program to work in conjunction with Orange Apron Media, the company's retail-media division. Right now, national brands that advertise on Home Depot's channels have to supply their own creative work. Going forward, those brands can have Studio Orange conceptualize and shoot that work for them—for a fee, of course. The initiative “is a big opportunity,” Santana said. “We can tap into national brands and have revenue coming in from projects like that.” The set and finished shot from the Winter Bath Event promotion. Home Depot's third click Ultimately, Studio Orange’s most ambitious goal will be the most challenging to achieve, which is broadening and enhancing what consumers think of when they think of Home Depot. One reason the company green-lit the whole enterprise was to have the means to produce videos—which are, of course, the preferred form of content online. “We’re speaking to the younger customers—we need to be on social, we need to do some TikTok,” Wiles said. “You can do more of those things because you have the in-house staff to pull it off.” The videos made here are frequently instructional (say, how to assemble a bathroom vanity) but they can also be inspirational. This summer, for instance, Studio Orange produced a short titled “How to Create a Gamer Space.” The three-and-a-half-minute production didn’t spotlight any products in particular but was instead meant to “help you think through the process” of creating a game room, Hudson said. “That’s different than something we would have done ten years ago.” In Ordahl’s view, Studio Orange’s content represents what he calls a “third click” in Home Depot’s brand evolution. In its early years, he said, the company established itself as a one-stop, big-box destination for homeowners. After that, it worked to position itself as a source of expertise and instruction. “Now they’re going to a third level,” he said, “trying to inspire you around home projects, to move you emotionally. They’re progressing along this continuum to own a more ephemeral space of emotion and dreams.” A promo shot for Home Depot's Kids Workshops. Floor planning for tomorrow That sort of goal takes time, of course. Studio Orange is less than a year old and, say officials, has yet to fully take wing. “There's so much potential within this space,” Santana said. “We're not utilizing all of it. We could easily double the staff and the project flow that we have right now.” For the time being, there are also limits to what Studio Orange can realistically pull off. “One of the skillsets that we do not have under this roof is broadcast,” Santana said. “That is still an important channel for us. We'll leverage our agency partners to do those broadcast shoots.” Despite the cost savings it hopes to realize by pulling more creative work in-house, Battin maintains that the brand is not looking for a complete break from the traditional model. “We’re not thinking of Studio Orange as a replacement for our agency partners,” she said. “The studio is a great collaborative space that we invite our partners to take advantage of when we are working together.” Some jobs will always have to go to contracted help. A full-time hair and makeup person isn’t economically viable. Nor is a pen full of animals. Studio Orange’s conceptualists in Atlanta like to feature animals because they add a touch of whimsy and help to make an otherwise commoditized item look more interesting. Even so, the last few days of the Lifeproof shoot have been challenging. Rigby the dog’s been a dream compared to his costars. The alpaca kept eating carrots off the kitchen island, the ferrets were hard to control and the pigs—given strawberry ice cream to spread around the vinyl—really did make a serious mess. “We got a little jaded after a day with the pigs,” Hudson said.

Content Strategy

An Exclusive Peek Inside Studio Orange, Home Depot's Hushed New Content-Producing Workshop

The brand transformed an old furniture studio into a creative factory

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Robert Klara

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