Why Brook Taverner ditched Dropbox for Dash

Who are Brook Taverner?

If you’re partial to a blazer or a pair of shiny chrome cufflinks, you may have come across a Brook Taverner shop in various locations around the UK. Their tailors have been providing style, comfort and craftsmanship to shoppers for over a century.

But it doesn’t end with the public. Brook Taverner supplies uniforms to some of the biggest hotels, airlines and banks in the world. They do this by connecting up with corporate clothing specialists around the globe. These distributors then sell to their customers in the professional industries.

Turning 10M worth of stock into profit

For businesses, one of Brook Taverner’s key selling points is the amount of stock they have at one time. Matt Fletcher, their Marketing Manager, says:

“We can quickly kit out an entire airline or hotel because we’ve got everything ready to go in our warehouse. It’s one thing that helps us stand out against competitors; the sheer amount of stock we hold.”

Sometimes, they can have up to £10M worth of product waiting and ready to go!

It’s Matt’s job to help market and sell these products. He works with a team of designers and account managers to get the latest clothing lines to their customers.

“I work with our designer to pick a model, go out on location and take pictures. Once I get those images back, it’s my job to send them to the website, build emails and get them ready for print in our brochure.”

As well as promoting via online channels, Brook Taverner sends account managers out to meet clients and sell them the latest product lines. With all this going on, you can imagine there’s a lot of visual content that needs to go around.

The problem: Nobody can find anything in Dropbox

Before Dash, the team was using Dropbox to manage all of their visual content.

“Our Account Managers and sales support team were always being asked for images. The problem with Dropbox is that it’s just a list of files so you have to know exactly what you’re looking for. It was really frustrating for everyone involved.”

Their distributors need access to the latest product shots too. And having disjointed thumbnails of different products does nothing to highlight the collections of suits and uniforms on offer.

“We needed a way to mix and match different items of clothing on screen. So we might have a pair of chinos from one collection and a jacket from another which our distributors could then use to create an outfit. Dropbox just didn’t do the job. We basically needed an online photo gallery that was searchable and filterable.”

Hello, Dash! 👋😇

The solution: Distribution made easy

Dash differs from Dropbox because it’s been built to search and find visual content. (Dropbox, on the other hand, is better for general file storage). Instead of scrolling through tiny thumbnails, account managers and distributors can use Matt’s custom tags and filters to get to the images they need. This was something Charlie, Dash’s Customer Success Lead, helped him with when Matt first started.

“I knew what filters we needed when we first signed up to Dash. For example, we wanted to search by different fits like ‘slim fit’, ‘tailored fit’ and ‘classic fit’. We couldn’t do that in Dropbox. So I spoke to Charlie who was able to set that up for me in Dash instead.”

He also showed me how to set up controlled tags so that nobody misspells any of our products. And, he even showed me how to start our first Collection.”

A Collection is a selection of images and videos from across your Dash that you can group and send off to freelancers, agencies and external teams. Matt and the team of account managers use Collections to create different looks (like a lookbook) which they can then fire off to clients and distributors.

This is perfect for quickly showcasing a new selection of clothes, without needing to browse through the entire Dash account. 💡

For Brook Taverner, using Dash to manage and share visual content is just the start. Matt plans to turn their account into a full marketing hub where people can go to access PDFs and other files they need to sell their products.

To wrap up, Matt says:

“Our team and our customers absolutely love Dash. We’ve had nothing but positive feedback. It’s just so easy to use and we no longer have to rely on Dropbox to share our content.”