The History & Heraldry (H&H) Group is an impulse gifting supplier in the UK. They own multiple brands and sell to 40+ countries around the world. They design impulse gifts - that’s products like mugs, pens, keyrings and Christmas decorations - and they’ve got a growing home fragrance business called Heart and Home.
With so many areas of the business to manage it’s no wonder that Griselle, the company’s Export Marketing and Photography Executive, needs a digital asset management (DAM) tool.
Let’s dig into some of the reasons why. ✨
Nobody knew what images they were sending
H&H sells to retailers around the globe. They’ve got teams in key locations including the UK, USA, China, Spain, Germany, Italy and France. Each country has its own marketing and customer service team who sell products to the service and tourism industry.
And to do that, they all need product photography. 📸
When Griselle moved into her role as the brand’s photographer, it was clear that their file management system wasn’t up to scratch. Her predecessors had been using an internal system built by the IT team to share product images.
“It was really slow and painful to use. The customer service team, for example, would download a massive ZIP folder full of images and send it off to their retailers via WeTransfer. They had no clue what was inside the folder. They knew what product it was, but they didn’t know if it was a single product shot or a group of products against a backdrop. They just had no idea. ”
Griselle decided it was time to invest in a digital asset management tool. She was looking for something that would allow her to do two specific things: find and view product shots easily and share them with the international teams.
Let’s see how Dash does just that. 👇
Automatic tagging helps everyone find what they need
Automatic tagging makes it easy to search for an image in Dash. On upload, Dash uses AI to identify the objects within your images and assigns them tags you can search by. To show you what we mean, here’s a search for ‘soap dish’ in H&H’s account:
Pretty nifty, right?
Griselle thinks so. ✨
“Even if I don’t manually tag an image on upload, I can still find what I’m looking for later on. The automatic tagging works really well. I’ve not had anybody tell me that they can’t find what they’re looking for.”
You can combine that by adding your own custom tags and fields. This is useful if you want to search by keywords specific to your brand, like a unique product colour that you want to filter your images by. Tags and fields also mean that you can store the same image in multiple folders - bye bye duplicate files. 👋
What’s more, you can see that Dash puts your visual assets first. There’s no clicking on tiny thumbnails or extracting images from ZIP folders. This is useful for H&H’s sales team who want to show new product lines to their customers.
Making sure people only have access to the assets they need
Teams all around the world are selling different product lines to different retailers. That means H&H have to be careful who they’re showing their product images to. Imagine how confusing it would get if the sales team in Italy tried to sell a UK-exclusive product.
To avoid this, Griselle uses Dash’s access permissions. She’s set up 13 groups and each one has a specific permission attached to it.
The different labels - UK, Italy, Export - all relate to folders within H&H’s Dash account. So if you’re in H&H’s UK sales team, you’ll only have access to the UK folder. You’ll be able to search for images and filter through content using tags and fields. And you’ll be able to download images in different formats and crop sizes. You won’t, however, be able to upload your own content or make any admin changes.
💡 If you’ve got lots of different teams who need to access your Dash, you can set up public portals. These areas are accessible to anyone who has a link but they don’t need a login.
Using Dash to grow the brand
H&H do two massive product launches every year. You can imagine the amount of work that goes into getting new product images and brochures out to the wider teams.
Griselle uses Dash to make sharing the new brochures easier.
(Oh yes, you can store PDFs in Dash too. 🙌)
The best part is, if she ever needs to add an updated version of a brochure to Dash, anyone who has previously downloaded it will get notified that a new one is available. ✨
So what does the future look like for H&H?
Griselle told us that the company is growing and they’re constantly adding new products to their website. And Dash will play a vital role in ensuring they showcase their product images and catalogues to people around the world.
She says:
“I can’t tell you what a blessing Dash has been. Everyone is loving it, so we’ll be continuing to use it as our brand grows. The support has been amazing as well.” 🥰
