How Passenger manages thousands of creative assets across multiple online platforms

Challenge: Passenger has a huge range of visual assets spanning from photography to video and graphics, all of which it relies on to launch new products. Before Dash, approving and managing new product shots was messy and time-consuming. Plus, with a remote team, there was no single source of truth for the brand’s visual content.

Solution: Dash gives Passenger a central, searchable hub for all their product, lifestyle, and community visual assets. It’s made it easier to collaborate, launch products faster, and grow the business.

About Passenger

Passenger is a responsible outdoor clothing brand that inspires meaningful escapism. Encouraging people to disconnect and recharge in nature, the brand believes time outdoors fosters balance, wellbeing, and adventure.

Their team is mostly remote, with staff based across the UK and Europe. And as the business continues to scale, they need a reliable way to manage and share content across teams. 

We’re also big fans of Passenger in the Dash team, so we were excited when they decided to join Dash as their DAM of choice! 🥰 

Let’s get into some challenges before they found Dash.

The challenge

The importance of creative assets 

Like many ecommerce brands, creative assets are vital to Passenger in helping them market their wide stock range and product variants. They also use their creative to bring that meaningful escapism ethos to life. A lot of their photography features inspiring outdoor settings to reflect this and help connect with their audience on a deeper level. Plus, these assets are the key to helping the brand grow. Kat, the brand’s Product Marketing Coordinator, says:

“Having inspiring, high-quality imagery is key to helping us appeal to and engage with our target customer, who we call the ‘Roamer’. Content plays a huge role in getting our brand out there and driving growth.”

Managing thousands of assets across teams

Kat has to make sure every channel is optimised to meet dimension requirements. It’s also her job to keep product descriptions up to date. 

She also manages a wide range of photography assets - studio and lifestyle - alongside community content from brand ambassadors and influencers.

It’s a big job, and with so much content coming in at once, Kat needs a process that helps her stay in control of it all—from approvals to cropping, tagging and publishing.

A mix of Google Drive, WeTransfer and hard drives made life difficult

Kat joined the company when Dash was already in full swing, but from what she’s heard from her teammates, things used to be much harder to manage.

“Before Dash, the team was juggling WeTransfer links, hard drives and Google Drive folders. That would’ve meant downloading from one place, resizing images in Photoshop, uploading somewhere else—nothing was centralised.”

It made it really difficult for anyone to find what they needed, especially when different people were saving assets in different places, with no consistent naming or folder structure.

Plus, from Kat’s previous experience, switching between multiple tools is fiddly and inefficient. This means work is slowed down and it takes longer to get new product content out into the wild. 

💡 Learn more about why Google Drive and WeTransfer are no replacement for a proper digital asset management tool.

It was difficult to collaborate with remote teams

While working remotely opens up new opportunities for Passenger, it also creates new challenges, especially when it comes to sharing content. That’s because each team has different asset requirements. 

Trying to manage all of that using Google Drive links and hard drives just wasn’t scalable. So, Passenger needed a way to make content easier to manage, find, and share, no matter where the team was working from.

The solution 

Organising content that makes sense for their team 

Passenger keeps thousands of creative assets in Dash. We’re talking product shots, lifestyle photography, flat lays, and creative coming in from influencers around the world. 

The great thing about Dash is that even if you have this many assets, it doesn’t need to be overwhelming. You can tag your images based on product, SKU, colour, season and more. Plus, custom fields make it easier to categorise content without the need for duplication. Take this example. It has tags that indicate the type of shirt, SKU code and campaign season.

It means there are multiple ways to search for this asset without the need to duplicate it in multiple folders. Ultimately, this ensures that anyone across every team can find what they need quickly.

Making sure product pages have the best, optimised images 

Kat needs to make sure every product on the Passenger website is shown in the best possible light. That means carefully selecting a mix of studio flatlays, lifestyle photography, and sometimes community content to help bring each product to life.

Having everything in one place makes that process so much easier.

“For me, the biggest thing is having all the content in one place. I need to make sure that each product detail page has the best possible images, so being able to type in a product title or SKU and instantly see all the flatlays, lifestyle shots, and any community content is super helpful.”

Dash’s built-in cropping tool also helps Kat prep images for the website without needing to open up separate design software. 

“What I love about Dash is that I can crop and download everything in one place. I don’t have to grab files from somewhere else and then open Photoshop to make adjustments—it’s all done in Dash, which is a huge time-saver.”

Getting products to market faster 

Bringing a new product to market involves a lot of moving parts. You’ve got studio shots and lifestyle photography, community content and campaign assets. Kat needs to make sure all of that content comes together and is ready to go live when the product does.

Take Passenger’s recent launch of their Snowscape Collection.

“One of our most exciting launches at the start of this year was our snow gear, and Dash made a big difference. 

Kat was able to quickly surface content across multiple types of assets. 

“It’s great being able to search for a term like ‘snow’ and instantly find all the relevant content. We’ve had loads of people trying out the gear and sending us their content, so being able to easily access and organise that has been really helpful.”

Here’s what it looks like to search for a keyword in Passenger’s Dash.

Thanks to the team’s organised folder structure and smart filtering, every department can find what they need in seconds.

“It makes everything much more efficient. Passenger was already using Dash when I joined, but based on my experience at previous companies, I can confidently say Dash is way more efficient and time-saving when it comes to getting campaigns launched.” 

A single source of truth for the company 

Having Dash means there’s one single source of truth for all their creative content. Kat said it’s made a big difference to how everyone is working. 💕

“It’s been a massive improvement. Especially with so many of us working remotely now, it’s really important to have a shared online space where everything lives.

We’re quite a creative business, and different teams need access to different types of content. Having everything in one central place is crucial—it makes sure everyone’s using the right assets, whether it’s product images or something like the correct logo. It’s basically our source of truth.”

Using Dash and Airtable for better product management 

Passenger uses Dash alongside Airtable to manage product imagery and get everything prepped for their Shopify store. It’s a workflow that makes sure every product goes live with the right visuals in place.

If you haven’t come across it before, it's a no-code database that combines the flexibility of a spreadsheet with the structure of a project management tool. At Passenger, it’s become the central hub for managing product listings before they hit their Shopify site.

“The flow is basically: get the assets from Dash into Airtable, and then from thereupdate Shopify. We can also make edits directly in Airtable.”

Even though Kat wasn’t part of the team before Airtable was introduced, she’s seen how well it works today and using Dash and Airtable together makes the whole process so much easier.

Testing Dash’s AI features

PWith thousands of assets, any time-saving tool is a win for the Passenger team. That’s why they’re excited about some of the new AI features we’re working on. That includes smart tagging, similar image suggestions and natural language search. Katherine told us the team has been finding the natural language search really useful: 

“A lot of the marketing team has been using it to search for social content. You can search for something like snow and it’ll bring up all the relevant images—which is really cool.

It’s also great for finding content based on activities. For example, if we’re launching a new range, we can easily find inspiring images that fit the theme, without having to manually tag everything beforehand. Manual tagging can be tricky, and it’s so easy to miss things, so this has been a really helpful feature.”

If you’re excited by the idea of AI in DAM (we know we are 🤩) you can sign up for a 14-day free trial and be one of the first to access these new features. ✨

Kat’s recommendation to other ecommerce brands 

Finally, we asked Kat if she’d recommend Dash to other brands. She said yes! 🥰

“Yes, 100%. I’d recommend it to all ecommerce brands, especially those with remote teams.

It’s so useful when everyone’s spread across the country—or even internationally. Having one central place where all content lives makes it easy for everyone to access what they need for their role.”