ITC Candyman: Once Upon A Time
An award-winning AI platform that turns any child into the hero of their own illustrated storybook. One photo, one adventure — a fully personalised hardcover, generated in seconds.
Client
ITC Candyman (ITC Foods)
Services
AI Personalisation Platform
Industry
FMCG / Confectionery
Year
2025
Challenge
Put a child's real face inside an illustrated story — convincingly, instantly, safely — and do it for thousands of families at once.
ITC Candyman wanted to move beyond the candy shelf and give parents something to keep: a personalised storybook with their own child as the hero. Easy to say, hard to build. A toddler's face had to be mapped onto an illustrated character while preserving their features, skin tone and expression — and stay recognisably the same child across every page of every story. It had to feel magical in under a minute, run reliably for thousands of parents at the same time, and — because this is a children's product — handle every uploaded photo with absolute care.
The experience · 5 small steps. Big magic.
From a selfie to
a storybook hero.
Parents never see the machinery. They choose an adventure, upload one photo, and a complete illustrated book — their child woven through every page — is generated and ready to read or print. The whole journey is built to feel like magic, not software.
Solution
We built Once Upon a Time by Candyman end to end — the custom model, infrastructure, backend and the AI pipeline that turn a single photo into a finished book. Our face-swap model places a child into the story while keeping the details that make them recognisable: their features, their skin tone, their smile.
The real challenge is keeping that same child looking like themselves across all ten pages, not just one. Our pipeline and post-processing handle that end to end, personalise the story around the child's name, and render finished books to read on screen, share, or order as a printed hardcover. Every photo is used once and deleted the moment the book is made, and the system handles thousands of storybooks at the same time.
Under the hood
The platform runs on a queue-based, asynchronous architecture. The moment a parent uploads a photo, the request is acknowledged and the heavy work is handed off to a separate processing tier — so the site stays instant even when thousands of books are being generated at once.
We split the system deliberately: a lightweight application layer handles requests, authentication and abuse protection, while a dedicated GPU layer does the generative work. That separation lets each scale independently under load.
Every upload passes a quality and safety gate — face detection and image checks — before anything is generated. Our personalisation model then casts the child as the lead character and holds that likeness consistent across every page, the part that's genuinely hard to get right. Finished books are rendered to print-ready files, and parents are notified the moment theirs is ready.
Photos are processed in memory and deleted as soon as the book is made — nothing is retained. The whole pipeline is built to be fast, horizontally scalable, and safe enough for a children's product.
Pick your adventure
Two worlds.
One little hero.
Every book is generated end to end by our AI — an original story brought to life as full illustrations, then personalised so the child appears as the lead character on every spread, cover to final page.
Under the hood
What made it feel like magic
Recognised by the industry
Award-winning by design
Beyond the smiles, the work earned the industry's attention — recognised across three awards at two of the industry's most respected shows, the Festival of Media APAC Awards and the ABBYs, for its use of technology and AI.
The outcome
Why it mattered
See it in action
Watch the magic
Creator amplification
Made to be shared
To spread the magic, parenting creators and influencers put their own children at the centre of a Candyman story — walking through the real, minute-long flow and turning every finished book into a shareable moment across social.
In the press
The launch made news
India's marketing, media and advertising press covered Once Upon a Time by Candyman as a benchmark for child-centric, AI-powered brand experiences.
Try it yourself
Make your child the hero.
The campaign is live. Preview the magic, or create a free personalised storybook starring the child in your life — in about a minute.
