Down the Rabbit Hole: Generating AI Mock Images for Bontique
How the Bontique team replaced boring test placeholders with an army of hyper-realistic, impeccably dressed AI-generated rabbits.
We’ve had a bit of a rabbit infestation in our staging environment this week.
Normally, testing new internal functionality at Bontique means staring at a sea of uninspired grey placeholder boxes. Since our platform is all about beautiful gifts and life events, I wanted to inject some actual life into our test data. The challenge was finding images that fit our themes perfectly, but were undeniably “fake” to keep them strictly separated from our real, production-ready catalog.
The answer turned out to be AI-generated, photorealistic rabbits dressed appropriately for every possible human occasion.
The Workflow: Prompts First, Pixels Second
To get consistent, high-quality results, I didn’t just start blindly asking an image generator to draw bunnies. I split the process into a two-step approach:
- The Brainstorming Chat: First, I used a single AI text chat solely as a prompt generator. I fed it a few reference images of what I liked and asked it to create a diverse list of 12 detailed, 16:9 prompts covering all our core Bontique events (birthdays, weddings, housewarmings, etc.).
- The Generation Chats: Once I had my master list of highly detailed prompts, I moved to the image generation phase. I used separate chat instances for each specific image. This prevented the AI from blending concepts and ensured that the aesthetic - photorealistic, macro photography of fluffy rabbits in knitted clothes - remained perfectly consistent across the board.
The CTO’s Request & The Matrix Mutiny
The initial batch turned out incredible. I had a bunny in a tiny tuxedo for weddings, a rabbit in a knitted graduation cap, and a cozy lop-eared bunny for “Get Well Soon” cards.
I proudly demoed this new, much more vibrant test environment to the Bontique CTO. He loved them, but being a tech leader, he immediately spotted a missed opportunity:
“These are great… but where is the RabbitMQ thematics?”
Before I could even process the pun, the rest of the development team chimed in. If we were doing tech-themed rabbits, they demanded a Matrix-inspired “Follow the White Rabbit” scene.
AI to the Rescue
The true magic of our current AI tooling is the speed of iteration. I jumped right back into my generation workflow. Within minutes, I had a sleek developer bunny managing message queues, a hacker bunny in a dark terminal cave, and an absolute masterpiece: a Morpheus bunny offering a Neo bunny the red and blue pills in a dingy, cable-filled room.
The Final Polish
The raw generated images looked amazing, but even test environments shouldn’t be sluggish. Before loading them into our internal Bontique system, I passed the entire set through pngquant to compress and optimize them perfectly.
Now, every time we run internal tests on our gift card flows, we are greeted by a cast of impeccably dressed, highly professional rabbits. It brings a little bit of joy to the QA process.
(Check out some of our favorite test-bunnies below!)
