A brand kit sits above your products and carries the things that should be the same in every lot: the mark, the palette, one sentence of voice, and a default look.
Build one by hand, or read one out of the brand’s own site, which gives you the mark, the name and the one colour the site states about itself.
Everything in a kit is a default
It fills what you left empty. It never writes over what you named.
That is the whole discipline, and it is what makes a kit safe to leave switched on. A lot that declares a look keeps its look. A lot that declares none gets the brand’s.
The look in particular is taken whole or not at all. Half-merging the kit’s look with yours, its film stock, your lighting, would produce a third look nobody chose and nobody could predict. So if you set a look, it is yours; if you set none, it is the brand’s.
Which kit a lot ends up under
Three steps, in order, and it stops at the first answer:
- The kit you named on the call, if you named one.
- Otherwise, the kit the chosen product is filed under.
- Otherwise, none.
The middle one is the useful one and it is easy to miss. If your products are filed under their brands, you usually want to name no kit at all, then each product brings its own, which is exactly what a multi-brand library wants. Naming one forces every SKU in a batch under the same brand, which is right for a single-brand shelf and wrong for an agency’s.
An archived kit still applies. Archiving takes it out of the pickers; it does not un-brand the eight products already filed under it, and a lot built from one of those should still carry the mark it has always carried.
The palette becomes a sentence, not a list of tokens
This is the design decision worth knowing, because it explains something you might otherwise report as a bug.
A kit’s colours are appended to each shot as a written clause, graded to the brand palette followed by the colours, rather than as bare hex codes. A prompt that ends in #0f2a44 does not get graded to that colour; it gets the characters #0f2a44 rendered onto the picture, because that is what a model does with a string it does not recognise as an instruction.
The same reasoning runs through the rest of the product: colour belongs to a material and a light. “Crimson silk catching the cold spill from the corridor” is an instruction. “Red and blue” is a list.
The palette clause is appended whether or not you set your own look, because it is a fact about the brand rather than a choice about this particular film.
The mark travels as a reference
The brand mark joins the shot’s reference pack the same way product photography does, not as a new mechanism, but as one more picture the model is shown.
That matters when you are near a model’s reference limit. Packs are sent in a fixed order (creator first, then the product map, then the packshot, then oldest), so a model that only accepts two references keeps the face and the product and drops what is behind them. It is the right thing to drop, but you should know it happened rather than wonder why the logo is missing.
Picking a model covers what each one does with references it cannot fit.
What a kit is not
It is not a style transfer and it is not a trained model. Nothing about it teaches a provider what your brand looks like. It is a set of defaults that stop the fortieth lot drifting away from the first, which is a smaller claim and a true one.