When you are the creative director of a rapidly growing retail startup with a worldwide presence, relying on Slack or, even worse, email as your primary asset management tool is a recipe for chaos.
But, this was the reality that Benoit Habfast, the creative director of the French sneaker brand CAVAL, was experiencing when the company began a highly successful Indiegogo campaign to raise capital in 2019.
At any given time, Habfast was managing dozens of campaigns and a variety of products, including CAVAL’s innovative, handcrafted line of “mismatched sneakers.” CAVAL’s meteoric success has meant an increased need for marketing campaigns, online storefronts, and social media presence, with massive amounts of photo content being created for all of these different outlets.
Scalable asset management is essential to successful growth.
High demand for photos across all departments at CAVAL has created thousands of assets that need to be organized and managed on a daily basis. An image library of this size can easily get disorganized, making it difficult to ensure everyone on the team can quickly find the assets they need for a project.
Habfast and his team struggled to find media management software that solved all of their problems. As a stopgap, they were storing files on their desktops and external hard drives. “They were half on my computer, half on some hard drives, and a bit on Google Drive too,” he said. “We would share by sending through Slack or email, but it was a big pain.”
In order to keep pace with the company’s growth, Habfast needed to centralize the image library so the entire Caval team could easily search and find exactly what they needed. MediaSilo helped CAVAL create an effective asset management strategy. That’s when the brand turned to MediaSilo and its organization workflows. Habfast found MediaSilo’s project and folder-based structure, tagging features, and robust search functionality to be the exact media management solution the brand needed.
Tagging streamlines file organization.
CAVAL’s creative team started by moving all of the existing files off of their desktops and hard drives and uploading their vast library of content into the cloud-based MediaSilo platform. Although organizing the files into projects and folders was a good jumping-off point, Habfast found that using tags was the real key to unlocking the full potential of the system.
As new content was continually added to their MediaSilo account, the team established a system for uploading where tagging assets was an integral and routine part of the process. Using MediaSilo’s bulk-tagging feature, the team easily added relevant tags as new content was uploaded into their projects. After dragging and dropping batches of related content into the system, the team selected all of the new assets and labeled them with relevant tags in one easy step.
Structured tagging eliminates redundancy.
The CAVAL team was looking for a system that would eliminate overlaps while requiring as few tags as possible. Using the MECE Principle to structure image tags and guide his tagging in MediaSilo, Habfast settled on four essential tags that would effectively organize every image in their account.
“E-commerce” and “Creative” are the first tags to be added to every asset, differentiating between images intended for the online storefront and images that will be used for a creative marketing campaign. “Model” and “Packshot” are the second layer of tags, indicating whether the image has a person or model wearing the sneakers or features the sneakers alone.
With this simplified tagging strategy, Habfast’s team built an organizational structure within MediaSilo that breaks down their entire content library into those four target image categories. Supplemental tags for product name, reference number, and special campaigns such as “Valentine’s Day” are added on top of the four primary categories to further distinguish individual images and create a more robust search experience.
Intuitive, tag-driven search makes it easy to find content.
“Now, we don’t ask on email or Slack anymore, ‘Hey can you send me that file.’ We know where to find that file—there’s just one place to find everything.”
With this new, more organized tagging structure, CAVAL’s MediaSilo users can easily and intuitively search for assets in their account. Using MediaSilo’s advanced global search, users can select one or more tags from a picklist; apply additional filters, such as who uploaded the assets and when they were added; and narrow thousands of assets to a select few by searching for a handful of relevant keywords.
MediaSilo’s cloud-based media management software has enabled CAVAL to get images off of a hard drive and into a feature-rich, easy-to-navigate platform. By centralizing its asset workflow, MediaSilo allows the entire CAVAL team to securely share and access the files they need when they need them. As Habfast explained, “Now, we don’t ask on email or Slack anymore, ‘Hey can you send me that file.’ We know where to find that file—there’s just one place to find everything.”
MediaSilo empowered CAVAL to scale its asset management processes so employees are free to focus on their high-level creative projects, new campaigns, and marketing strategies.
If you’re ready to find out how MediaSilo can enable growth and drive organization workflow efficiency for your team, sign up for a free 14-day trial of MediaSilo.
