The Laravel News site has posted a tutorial that takes you deeper with factories when using the framework looking at the factory states.

I suspect that if you are familiar with Laravel that you might use factories and possibly even factory states in your application development. The documentation shows you the mechanics of using factories to seed and create test data, but there are a couple of guiding thoughts to using factories with your models effectively that I’d like to consider.

He starts with two options he sees for using factory states: making them with static values or using them to make simple models instead. He goes through these two options, introducing some of the basic concepts of each, how it would work and the code to make it happen. He also covers a few other approaches including the use of a trait to include the factory functionality directly in a class. He finishes the post with a few links to more information in the Laravel manual and other outside resources/tools.