Challenges: The creative design team at Beavertown were struggling to keep track of their assets and were spending too much time hunting around in Dropbox.
Solution: Dash has offered them a secure DAM solution. It allows them to protect Beavertown’s brand identity and ensure that only approved content is being deployed to their channels. This, in turn, has saved them time and allowed them to get back to their creative roles.
About Beavertown
When Beavertown first launched over 10 years ago, they wanted to create a craft beer brand that was built on creativity. Their characterful designs and illustrations are what set them apart in the craft beer industry.
The business has expanded significantly since then - but the vision has remained the same. And as more people join the company, it's really important for them to maintain the design-led approach that makes Beavertown so recognisable.
That’s why Lily - Beavertown’s Senior Digital Creative - says it's vital they have a way to organise, share and use their ever-evolving library of illustrations across the brand’s channels.
The challenge
When Lily first joined Beavertown in 2021, the design team was pretty new. Despite the brand being driven by illustrations, they didn’t yet have an established team to help expand and properly utilise the designs. It also meant they didn’t have an established asset library. Instead they were making do with a file organisation system that’s not set up for team collaboration.
That tool was Dropbox.
Whilst Dropbox is fine for document management, it’s nearly impossible to properly search and find your visual content. Here are the challenges Lily and her team were facing.
They couldn’t search for their images
Dropbox was built for general file management, but Beavertown was using it to store and manage illustration and graphic design assets. Unlike digital asset management tools (like Dash 😇), Dropbox makes it really hard to search for visual assets because it can’t identify the contents of a picture. For example, if Lily wanted to find a product in their merch collection, she had to remember the exact file name. The problem with solely using file names to search for creative is that everyone in the team has different ways of naming content. Things can get very chaotic, very fast.
“The file management was just chaos. There were so many folders in there just called ‘untitled’. It’s also wild how we’ve become so advanced in AI but when you type in the search bar in Dropbox, it comes up with irrelevant results that I didn’t search for. I could never in a million years type “oversized cream t-shirt” into Dropbox and get what I was looking for. I hated it.”
Dropbox got overwhelming
When the team was small, it was easier to manage content in Dropbox. But as Lily pointed out, Dropbox is best for individual projects - it can’t handle bigger teams working on multiple campaigns. So as people across design, marketing, CRM (and more) joined the company, lots more content was being uploaded and it quickly became overwhelming. What’s more, everyone was using the same login details because they had limited accounts.
People weren’t sure what they could and couldn't use - which meant a large part of Lily’s day was spent finding assets for her colleagues.
“That took a lot of time away from me and the design team because someone would send us a request for example: “I'm looking for that blue skull. Can you send it to me?” We were doing that multiple times a day.”
There was no approval process
Before the design team was properly established, people across the marketing team were creating content for Beavertown’s marketing channels. There were no set access permissions so anyone could download anything from Dropbox and push it out to their channels.
“A lot of people were doing the design work themselves or working with agencies. They’d send Dropbox links that weren't necessarily signed off by someone. We needed a proper sign-off process to stop people picking random stuff in Dropbox and sending it off to our partners.”
This is particularly important to Beavertown because their designs are integral to who they are. It was vital they found a tool that could help streamline this approval process.
The solution
Beavertown needed a way to set up solid approval processes and ensure they’re maintaining their visually-led brand identity in a competitive market.
That’s why Dash is the digital asset management (DAM) solution for them. 🤩
Tags help the team find assets fast
When you upload an asset into Dash, it automatically scans your image and adds tags. You can also add your own custom tags and fields to distinguish between different campaigns, product types and more.
In this case, Lily has added custom data including campaign name, product type, and usage rights. The great thing about using tags and fields, is that it doesn’t require your assets to sit within a specific folder. This image sits in the ‘beer’ folder, but you can also assign tags and fields without the need for duplication.
This means it’s easier for Lily and her team to find assets quickly. And Lily no longer has to field requests from colleagues when they can’t find what they’re looking for.
“The searchability in Dash is really great. For example, if I'm looking for something from a couple of years ago, I can actually find it because I can type in a keyword. I can also filter it by the year and I can choose the product. It’s really good because people were struggling to look for things before, but now they can look for themselves.”
Approvals and permissions ensure consistency
In Dash, you can give your users different levels of permissions. This is essential for Beavertown in ensuring different teams can only access the things they need. As Lily told us, the design team are the only ones with full permissions. The rest of the teams including marketing, sales and HR can only view specific folders.
“Being able to give our teams access to certain things is really important. For example, we don't want the HR team looking at our design working files because they just don't need to.”
Instead of being overwhelmed with loads of files and folders, each team can go directly to the folder that’s relevant to them. Plus, when these teams upload anything to Dash, Lily has set permissions so that it first goes to an approval dashboard. She can then edit tags, decide what folders the image will sit in and, if needed, reject anything that doesn't meet Beavertown’s brand guidelines.
“I really like this feature because it gives me visibility on what people are doing. If people want to upload stuff, it only takes me a few seconds to approve things. That also means that if one of the teams signs with an agency, they’re able to send them a link to a folder and everyone will know that all the assets in that folder have been approved first.”
Version control offers a paper trail of design updates
Picture this: you have multiple versions of the same graphic and, in Dropbox, they’re all labelered things like:
- Summer_campaign_graphic_v1
- summer_campaign_graphic_v2
- summer_campaign_graphic_v3 FINAL
- summer_campaign_graphic_v4_ FINAL.FINAL.
How is anybody supposed to know which is the approved version? In Dash, version control lets you update existing assets in a single entry. So if Lily uploads a new version of Beavertown’s logo, it’ll overwrite the older version and send a notification to anybody that’s previously downloaded it. But don’t worry - that older version doesn’t go anywhere. You’re able to view previous versions so you can see what changes have been made. This is useful when the design team needs to revert to a previous draft.
“The thing I love about Dash is when I upload a new version of one of the assets, and then get feedback about something we need to change, I can just upload the new version and it won’t create a duplicate. You can also see what it was before because, a lot of the time, we might decide to go back to a previous version.”
The Adobe Creative Cloud integration saves time
Dash connects with lots of different tools to make your workflows easier. One of those is the Adobe CC integration. It works by connecting your Dash library to Adobe, so that you can search for images within Photoshop or InDesign. Plus, when you update an asset in the Adobe suite, that change will also be reflected back in Dash. It saves a lot of space on your desktop.
It was also one of the biggest reasons Lily wanted to pick Dash as their DAM system.
“The integration to Adobe was really important for me. I am really into organisation, so not having to download and upload things to and from my desktop is a huge benefit. I can just go into the Dash search bar in Adobe and type in a keyword and it will appear from Dash. Any updates I make will automatically save and I just love that. It's so easy for me.”
Personalised onboarding for a seamless set-up
Moving from a cloud storage provider like Dropbox can feel overwhelming. When you’ve got thousands of assets scattered across different folders with confusing titles, it can be hard to know how to start migrating to a new system. 😅
With Dash, you get free onboarding support no matter what plan you choose. This was really helpful for Lily and her team who were learning the best way to tag and organise their assets in Dash.
“It was nice to have someone to talk to from Dash who was professional and experienced with the system. We worked with Emily who recommended we create a flow chart to see how everything links together. You can see where your trade assets will live, how your merchandise assets should be tagged. It's just good to have an overview of what different assets you have. It’s a really good way to start categorising everything.”
Giving agencies the assets they need
Beavertown often partners with agencies to help them promote their latest campaigns. Lily told us that Summer and Halloween are the busiest time for them. You can see from Beavertown’s illustrations that they’d lend themselves really well to the spooky season.
These campaign seasons are also the time they’re using Dash the most. They’re uploading new designs and sharing content with external collaborators. There’s a lot going on, so it’s important Dash is able to make the process as smooth as possible. One way they do this is using portals.
Portals are like a publicly accessible version of your Dash. You can pick which folders are visible and agencies can search, browse and download content without needing to ask you for them. This is particularly useful when Beavertown signs up a new agency. They have a brand portal which contains logos, iconography and brand fonts.
“We use portals for our brand bible. It's got assets that we're happy for people to use anywhere. This is really useful because when we had Dropbox, sometimes agencies would send us pitches and they’d be using low-res versions of our logo or old content that they found on the web.”
Ensuring agencies have access to your latest and more up-to-date brand assets means they can effectively promote your product - regardless of what channel they’re working with. 🙌
Lily’s recommendation to other beverage brands
Finally, we asked Lily if she’d recommended Dash to other drinks brands. It was a resounding yes! 🥰
“If you have a lot of assets and you’re feeling overwhelmed about where to start organising them then Dash is for you! The beginning set up might take you a little time to get sorted, but it’s well worth it in the end. You’ll save so much time on all of your other work. ”
Want to try Dash for yourself? You can sign up to Dash for free for 14 days or book a demo with our team.
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