Emmy London has been designing beautiful, timeless shoes for nearly 20 years. In that time, they’ve built up a stunning portfolio of high-quality products that feature in their ready-to-wear collection and special occasion wear.
Their brand ethos is underpinned by the importance of making women feel comfortable, not only on their wedding day but in every aspect of their life. They don’t sacrifice beauty when it comes to designing comfortable heels and they favour quality over quantity. They’ve also maintained a delicate, feminine aesthetic which helps set them apart from competitors.
These values are what Lucy, the brand’s Social Media Manager, needs to reinforce across all their marketing activity. And guess what—their visual content plays a vital role in this. ✨
Watch Lucy's video review on G2, or continue reading to learn more about how Emmy London uses Dash.
It’s impossible to find images in Dropbox
Lucy doesn’t just manage the brand’s social media channels. She also directs photoshoots and manages agencies and freelancers who help with their advertising and affiliate marketing. For every channel, Lucy needs to select the best photos from her shoots and send them over to the brand’s Founder and Creative Director, Emmy Scarterfield, for approval. Once approved, she can send them out to the right channels.
When Lucy first joined Emmy London, the team were using Dropbox to organise and share images. Anybody using Dropbox knows that it’s nearly impossible to use it for good image management. It makes your job 10 times harder than it needs to be.
“When I started, they warned me that Dropbox was not very well organised. And they weren’t wrong: I really struggled to find content and it made my job so difficult.”
The things Dropbox lacks are fields and tags and the ability to create good folder structures that make sense to your team. With Dropbox, this level of organisation is just not possible. Here’s what Lucy says about it:
“At Emmy London, we're all very visual people, and so finding things within Dropbox folders was next to impossible. Over the years, there have been multiple people in marketing roles and everyone has their own way of organising things. I often found that things were labelled or spelt incorrectly, and I had to dig through folders to find just one thing. There were so many duplicates as well! I realised we'd be able to work better when we could see all the photos in front of us, and this is where Dash has made such a huge difference for us.”
And what a difference it has made! Read on to learn how Emmy London organises their Dash.
Creating top-tier image organisation
As a fashion brand, Emmy London has specific terminology to describe product types, product lines and seasons. Using Dash, they’re able to incorporate this terminology into their taxonomy (this describes your DAM structure, by the way).
In Dash, Lucy has set up a number of fields that help describe their assets. They need to be filled out whenever someone uploads a new image or video. These include:
- Shot type: This describes whether an image is a still life shot, a styled shoot image, or a photo submitted by an influencer
- The product type: bridal shoe, a fashion shoe, a clutch bag, or an accessory
- The colour: Users can select from a number of preset colours
- Heel type: Whether it's a stiletto, a kitten heel, a block heel, or a pair of flats
- The seasons: Summer, spring, autumn or winter
There’s also an ‘approval’ field which indicates whether an image has been approved by Emmy and is ready to go out into the wild.
The more detailed the tags and fields are, the easier it’ll be to search for these images again in the future. Lucy says:
“When I first got started with Dash, filling out all the fields seemed like a daunting task, but when I go to search them later on, it makes life so easy. I can just type SS23 and the name of the shoe, and it'll come up with the exact photo I'm looking for.”
Dash assigns auto-tags to every image, so even if someone forgets to add a specific detail in the fields, it should be easy to find again using a keyword search.
But having a well-organised image library isn’t just good practice, it can actually help you come up with new marketing ideas, too. 💡
Using Dash to spark creative marketing ideas
Every few weeks Lucy and the brand’s co-founders, Emmy and Dickie, sit down and decide what products they’d like to promote for the next marketing cycle—which usually lasts around 6-8 weeks. They’ll usually pick a theme like “workwear” or “mother of the bride.”
It’s really easy for Lucy to take these themes and find inspiration in Dash. That’s because Dash is super visual. Whilst Dropbox presents your images in small, clunky thumbnails; Dash does your visuals justice by presenting them as clear, bold thumbnails—a bit like a Pinterest board.
Lucy can either flick through folders and explore different tags. Or she can type in a specific keyword like ‘tennis shoot’ to find assets to match the theme.
Planning content couldn’t be easier!
“I can plan a whole month's worth of content so quickly. When we were exclusively using Dropbox, it would take me so long to even think of what content we had and could share, but now it's all in front of me in Dash, I have so much inspiration.”
What’s more, you can personalise your Dash to match your brand aesthetic—which is one of Lucy’s favourite things about the system.
“One of the problems with Dropbox is that it's very harsh and corporate-looking. With Dash, we can easily personalise it to match our aesthetics which are pretty and feminine.” 🥰
When you’ve got a nearly organised image library, it makes sharing content with partners a breeze.
Getting the best content to affiliates and online publishers
Over the years, Emmy has partnered with some of the biggest bridal brands in the UK, including Sassi Holford, Phillipa Lepley, and Andrea Hawkes. They also feature in some of the most popular fashion publications like Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Who What Wear. (Just check out this article by Vogue that features Kate Middleton wearing one of Emmy London’s heels. 👠)
They also work with freelancers who help them secure spots on affiliate sites.
To be considered for publication, the team needs to get the best images of a particular product over to the publisher. For this, Lucy uses collections.
This feature allows Lucy to pick a selection of assets and add them to a private collection. She can then invite team members to the collection, or share it externally via email or a URL link.
“Say a blog needs a certain amount of photos or they're writing about a specific shoe. I'll create a collection with all of our best imagery of that shoe and then send it over to our affiliate teams who can share it with the publication. “
The collection link will then send the affiliate partner to a page that reflects Emmy London’s brand. It’ll contain all the images in that collection, and the partner can download the images they think will work best on their website.
This process is super helpful for everyone involved.
But don’t take our word for it. When we asked Lucy whether she‘d recommend it to other brands—she said yes! 🤗
“I honestly couldn't recommend it enough. Dash has been such a lifesaver. It's made everything so much quicker and it’s changed the game for me.”
If your brand is ready to ditch Dropbox and start speeding up your marketing game, you can grab a 14-day free trial below. We won’t even ask you for your credit card.
