MOO is a print and design company. They work with brands to take creative concepts and turn them into custom merchandise and marketing materials. That’s products like water bottles, stationary, flyers and—the staple they launched with in 2006—their famous MiniCard.
Ben, MOO’s Senior Artworker, says:
“We’re not your traditional printer. We want the brands who come to us to look great with the products we’re creating for them.”
But it’s not all about working with clients on their projects. MOO’s creative team also needs to create visuals their marketing team can use to find new clients. Having a searchable library of all their assets to hand is a key part of their creative operations. ✨
Using visuals to attract new clients
Ben works in the creative team who design assets for marketing. That’s the images and videos used on the website, on social channels and in paid campaigns. He oversees projects as they move from the design and photography phase into post-production, and then off to the marketing team who send assets out into the wild.
He says MOO’s visuals are fundamental to attracting new clients.
“A lot of people come to MOO because they’ve seen something we’ve done and it inspires them to come print with us.”
Just take a look at MOO’s Instagram page and you’ll see why brands want to work with them. 😍
To make these creative projects happen, the team needs access to a library of past designs and photography for inspiration. They also need somewhere the marketing team can go to grab the final deliverables for their campaigns.
MOO’s design team wanted a simple, visual DAM
Before Dash, MOO were using Bright’s other DAM, Asset Bank. It’s highly configurable and has features which match the needs of large organisations. It’s a perfect fit for companies like Aviva and University of Birmingham.
But it isn’t always suited for smaller teams if they have a tighter budget and less-complex workflows.
When MOO’s creative team started looking for alternatives, they thought it might be easier to scrap digital asset management altogether. They were getting ready to rely solely on Google Drive. 😅
But there are two big problems with Drive:
- You can’t search for images: Drive is fine for searching your documents. But it can’t search for images. You have to remember what filename your image was saved as, which isn't ideal if you’ve got loads of people saving images in your Drive.
- It’s uninspiring: MOO needs a tool that gives their design team inspiration. Drive displays files as tiny thumbnails and it’s really hard to pick out specific photos.
Luckily for us, the stars aligned. As MOO were getting ready to switch to Google Drive, we identified them as a better fit for Dash - our DAM for design-led, growing brands - and got in touch to show them around the system. ✨
“We were looking at going to Google Drive, but the tags, the searching and the ability to flick things through quickly is just not there. Dash is much better suited.”
😍
Building a living library of creative assets
Dash is like a search engine for your images and videos. You can type in a keyword and it'll scan your assets to give you relevant results. You can also use tags to filter down your search.
This is super-helpful for MOO’s design team when they’re looking for inspiration or if they need to retouch an older image.
“Dash is such a great tool for us. We upload all our retouched photography so when our designers are concepting they can jump into Dash, search for ‘business cards’ and because we’ve tagged everything with ‘business cards’ they can easily flick through and find what they need. It’s like a search engine for all our photography.”
Here’s what Ben and his team see when they search ‘business cards.’
Dash makes their creative operations seamless
There’s a lot of work that goes into creating assets for MOO’s marketing channels. You’ve got designers who work on creative concepts, photographers who shoot product images, and artworkers, like Ben, who’ll get the final creative retouched and ready for the marketing team. That’s a lot to juggle, but luckily MOO’s creative workflow runs like a well-oiled machine. Here’s how the team manage their projects and how Dash easily slots into their workflow.
“I love how we do things at MOO. It’s super organised and everything is done via tickets. A stakeholder puts through a ticket and that comes through as a request to me and my team. Then everything we’re working on for the stakeholder lives under that ticket name in our ticket system, Workfront. Then, in Dash, every project has its own folder with a ticket number which people can easily search for. If they don’t know the ticket number, they can just type a keyword and it’s still really easy to find what they need.”
This is what a project folder looks like in Dash.
You’ll note MOO includes the ticket number in the folder name and in the asset title for each associated image or video.
Using ticket numbers like that is key to how well the operation runs. Every project document and asset - from Drive to Dash - has a ticket number attached to it.
It makes things much easier to find. And it means the marketing team can easily access the finished assets in Dash without having to rummage through Google Drive. It saves everyone, from the designers using the system to the marketers who get assets out of it, so much time. Here are Ben’s final thoughts.
“Dash 100% saves us time. We've been using it for 6 months and I don’t know what we’d do without it. Before, we didn’t have any way of finding imagery without spending hours digging through stuff to find what we needed. Dash very much fulfils that purpose for an image library. It has totally refined our process.”
