Founded in 1883, UK brand Haws is the world’s oldest watering can brand. Their unique, patented watering cans are a favourite of both serious horticulturists and hobbyist houseplant parents alike. 🌱
A few years ago, they rebranded to support their pivot toward ecommerce, whilst still doing justice to the 130 years of heritage the company is rightly so proud of.
With serious investment in brand visuals, combined with ambitious growth plans, Haws started searching for a content organisation system to set them up for further success.
A single place for brand creatives
It’s frustrating when you’re trying to find an image and you’re not even sure where to begin your search.
That’s the position Haws were in before Dash. They were keeping assets in Microsoft Teams and their personal shared drives. As Josh Papworth, Haws’ Purchasing Manager, says:
“Before Dash our digital assets were a nightmare. There were files everywhere and nothing was organised. Some of them were in personal folders, which was the worst place for them when we work on a lot of projects together as a team. Honestly, it was a mess!”
After investing in a rebrand, Haws wanted a single source of truth for all their assets and decided it was time to start looking for a DAM. Keeping everything together in one place would help maintain design standards and make it easier for everyone to find the new brand assets.
But what made them go with Dash?
“We had calls with a couple of DAM vendors. But honestly, what swung it for us was Emily [she’s Dash’s onboarding team lead, you’ll probably chat to her if you book a demo!] She was absolutely brilliant. She put in a lot of work behind the scenes on setting us up, making our space feel like Haws already.”
Sold on the features and the customer support Dash offered (thanks to Emily 🥰), Haws were ready to get started.
Here's how what their Dash homepage looks like now. Beautiful. 🪴🚿
Finding content in no time
Haws wanted to use Dash to search through their thousands of creatives and find the assets they need, quickly. To do this, Josh and his team make clever use of three key features: folders, custom fields and AI tags.
“A lot of our assets fit nicely into folders. For example, we do a lot of lifestyle photography shoots, and all the photos from that are organised into their own folders.”
Josh and his team then add tags relevant to their brand to each asset.
“The assets are tagged by colour, model, product name - to name a few. I’ve gotten as many tags in there as possible so our team and our resellers can search anything within an image and get results.”
Take a look at the below screenshot for an example of how they've done this. Users of Haws's Dash can find this product shot through SKU, product material, product type, and more.
On top of that, Dash scans the images you upload and adds related tags based on what the image contains. Combining both these AI-generated tags with your own, like Haws, drastically cuts down the time it takes to find an image. Josh explains:
“We needed to include a contextual shot of one of our watering cans for our product pages, so people can understand the size of the product they were looking at. To find this, we used the auto tags, along with our own product tags, to search for pictures of the specific can with hands, or boots, to give a sense of scale.”
Helping 100+ retailers sell Haws with Dash
Haws has relationships with over 100 online and bricks-and-mortar resellers who stock their products around the world. Making it as easy as possible for retailers to sell Haws cans is important to the business, and it’s been a key part of how they've grown.
In Josh’s words:
“We want to make it as easy and fulfilling to sell Haws products as possible. Dash is a way for us to share all our assets with our customers and optimise their sales performance.”
To do that, Josh set up a Dash portal for each of their resellers.
For the uninitiated, a portal is a way of creating a sharable view of certain Dash folders. A portal visitor can search the folders you’ve given them access to and download the files they need, all without having to login to your actual Dash account. It’s great for working with partners who need constant access to your assets, just like Haws’ resellers.
“Each retailer can access various levels of photography. For our big customers, we set their permissions so they can access everything. For smaller customers, we might hold back some of the newer stuff to make it simpler for them. Some can also access videos and logos, depending on what they need.”
Here's what one of Haws's portals looks like. This stockist has been given access to a series of folders, like lifestyle and product photography, and Josh has personalised their welcome message. This partner can search across the folders they've been given access to. And it's all updated in real-time, too - so if Josh were to add more images to these folders, it'd instantly be available to their resellers.
Using portals also means resellers can make use of the high-quality, brand-approved photography Haws has taken, without needing to commission their own.
“Some of our partners don’t have the budget to spend on beautiful lifestyle images or product photography. By providing that for them, we help them on their journey to sell more Haws. And it’s a win for us, because the more of our products they sell, the more they’ll buy from us.”
Saving time and effort
So what results have Josh and his team seen since using Dash?
“Dash has made a huge difference in so many of the things I do. It definitely saves me time. And it’s also motivating. Now I know I’ll have all the assets to hand, and accessible, when I start a project and I don’t have to spend half my time sifting through folders to accomplish a task. Basically it’s means more time doing the work that needs doing, less time finding things.”
That’s credit to the work Haws has put into organising their assets, too. If you’re dealing with thousands of creatives, it’s worth taking the time laying the groundwork like Haws has done. Don’t worry if that sounds daunting - Dash makes it easy to do this and our onboarding team is always on hand to help.
And now the killer question - would Josh recommend Dash to other businesses like Haws?
“I’d definitely recommend Dash for brands who have a lot of digital assets and need an easy way to share them. It’s sped up our workflows and it’s made access to all of our assets much much easier. It’s just brilliant and it’s changed how I do a lot of my job. Dash is a really, really good product.”
Now, with even bigger plans for the future (including an imminent launch in America), they’re poised to grow further. Watch this space! ✨
