How a nimble creative team took flight.
Virgin Australia ramped up content production with Adobe Express for faster time to market and a stronger brand presence.
1-2
fewer approval cycle rounds across marketing and legal teams
40%
faster asset production for small- and medium-sized campaigns across owned channels
~2
hours saved per social media post and 1 to 2 days saved per campaign asset
"Small teams can do big things when they’re equipped with the right tools and empowered with the time to focus on high-impact, strategic work."
Zubair Khatry
Creative Studio Lead, Virgin Australia
A new approach for a soaring brand.
Zubair Khatry wanted the Creative Studio at Virgin Australia set up for success. However, rising content demands were putting pressure on his small team and pushing the production system to its limits.
The Creative Studio Lead at Virgin Australia since 2022, Zubair and his four designers were responsible for developing most of the group’s retail and tactical communications, juggling nonstop requests on tight timelines for a national brand with international reach. But demand was growing faster than the team’s capacity to deliver.
“We saw a 44% increase in creative requests quarter over quarter, sustained across six quarters,” Zubair says. “There was no way to keep up without making a change.”
Timelines were slipping, bottlenecks were growing, and something needed to shift. While Zubair knew they needed to accelerate output and scale production, he was equally focused on supporting his lean, hardworking team.
The solution? Shift routine production to a self-serve model built on Adobe Express. With locked brand elements, curated visuals, and clear brand guardrails built in Adobe Express, internal teams could create their own content without compromising consistency or overloading Virgin Australia’s Creative Studio.
The impact was immediate: final assets now move through the pipeline up to 40% faster, the team saves approximately 10 hours per week, and the Creative Studio is freed up to focus on the kind of strategic, high-value projects that elevate the brand.
“The ability to scale without burning out our team has changed everything. We can be strategic again.”
Zubair Khatry
Creative Studio Lead, Virgin Australia
Clearing space for strategy and craft.
For Zubair, achieving such success in creative speed and scale wasn't about the team working faster, but rather working smarter. They adopted a tiered model to empower marketers with self-serve creative tools.
Adobe Express allows the team to create templates and lock in brand elements. Adobe Stock collections provide volumes of safe, royalty-free images and videos for the team to leverage. And Adobe Creative Cloud Libraries brings everything together in one location for easy access. With clear brand guardrails established, teams outside the Creative Studio could suddenly produce routine assets independently, fast, and at scale, driving a 40% increase in overall content volume across owned channels like web, app, email, and social banners.
“Sometimes it’s quicker for marketers to create the work themselves in Adobe Express than write a brief,” Zubair says.
But it wasn’t just about speed — it was also about restoring the creative spirit of the team. “The ability to scale without burning out our team changed everything,” Zubair says. “We can be strategic again.”
Before Adobe Express, designers were buried under a backlog of more than 25 projects, with as many as 15 jobs stacked in a single designer’s queue. After adopting the app, marketers became more independent, projects moved faster without compromising quality, and designers could do more of the creative work they love, confident that routine tasks were in safe hands. The team now reallocates about 40 hours per month from manual execution work to high-value strategic projects.
"Small teams can do big things when they’re equipped with the right tools and empowered with the time to focus on high-impact, strategic work,” Zubair says.
Levelling up and extending brand impact.
To ensure success, Virgin Australia’s Creative Studio partnered with Adobe to roll out Adobe Express across the organization. In addition to creating branded templates, the team hosted live walkthroughs and developed clear documentation to help other teams understand when to use Adobe Express versus when to loop in designers.
“We didn’t just hand over templates and walk away,” Zubair says. “We made it intuitive and enjoyable and stayed connected on key approvals to keep quality high.”
That approach paid off. Marketing teams for a range of verticals quickly levelled up, achieving 30% faster turnaround times with approved templates and imagery while producing content that visually aligns with brand guidelines and reinforces a consistent “matching luggage” approach across owned channels. Even loyalty program communications — once reliant on hands-on design — move forward independently, delivering campaigns about two weeks faster than before to keep pace with deadlines and free the Creative Studio for stronger brand storytelling.
The impact goes beyond marketing. Virgin Australia's corporate communications team received their own set of locked brand templates and access to Creative Cloud Libraries, so they can handle supporting collateral for technology, legal, and internal communications without looping in designers.
“These requests used to get pushed aside because we had to prioritize revenue-generating work,” Zubair says. Now corporate communications can deliver on-brand content independently, which means fewer support requests hitting the Creative Studio and more time for designers to focus on the strategic projects that actually move the business forward.
Looking ahead: scaling with innovation.
Every detail matters when a global brand shows up in hundreds of different places. For Virgin Australia, it isn’t just about aesthetics — it’s about producing content that feels intentional and unmistakable anywhere it appears.
Adobe Express makes it easier and faster for Virgin Australia, a brand built on exceptional experiences, to deliver a cohesive look and feel across every channel.
Virgin Australia’s creative evolution is far from over. Zubair and his team are exploring Adobe Firefly, a generative AI tool integrated with Adobe Express and the professional applications in Adobe Creative Cloud, to help with templating and producing commercially safe content. They’re also considering implementing full-scale digital asset management for even more control and efficiency.
Zubair’s leadership now extends across the business, where he mentors creative teams to think more operationally and see their work not just as execution, but as a strategic enabler of brand growth. With Adobe Express, Virgin Australia’s creative output is soaring — and the team is more energized, engaged, and future-focused than ever.
Learn how to grow your brand and bring content to life faster with Adobe Express for Enterprise.
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