The challenge : RJ Living were relying on Google Drive and Google Photos to manage their brand’s images and videos. These tools were holding them back from growth because nobody could find the content they needed.
The solution :Dash is the single source of truth for RJ Living’s library of visual content. They can now easily search and share content with their team and external agencies to help sell more products.
Who are RJ Living?
Melbourne-based furniture company RJ Living pride themselves on designing for the Australian lifestyle. They build softly sculpted chairs with woven seats, dining tables fashioned to highlight the grain of the wood they’re made from and side tables created from natural stone.
As Nathan Oakley, RJ Living’s COO, explains:
“The Australian lifestyle is laidback, relaxed, and our designs reflect that. They’ve got a unique touch you won’t find with our competitors.”
Their contemporary designs, dreamt up by their talented in-house team, are crafted from organic materials and light timbers, bringing a touch of everyday luxury to homes across Australia.
The challenges
Before Dash, RJ Living were using Google Drive and Google Photos to manage and share their brand’s images and videos. Here are some of the challenges they faced:
Google Drive was uninspiring
Although RJ Living have a physical showroom in Melbourne, they’re primarily an ecommerce brand. Eye-catching product and lifestyle imagery is important for any company selling their wares online, and that’s particularly true for a furniture company.
“When buying furniture online it’s really hard to understand how it looks in your space. It’s not enough to just have a product image against a white backdrop - that won’t do much for a lot of people. So for us it’s about inspiring people with the spaces and allowing them to really understand what the product is about and how it’ll look in real life.”
As the brand grows, the need for this type of imagery increases. Plus, it’s a real source of pride for the team.
“A lot of the content, pretty much everything you see across our site, and across our channels, is imagery and video we’ve taken ourselves. That’s a big pride point for our team.”
Keeping all of this content in Google Drive was uninspiring and wasn’t doing their visuals any justice.
It was hard to scale with Google Drive
When you’ve got thousands of photos of your products - both archive and current - and you’re running a website, an Instagram account and social ads, you need a place to store your visual content which works for your business.
Keeping all of that content in Google Drive and Google Photos was becoming unmanageable and the system was starting to creak at the hinges.
“It was fragmented and became limiting pretty quickly. To keep a mental note of exactly where each image of a product isn’t very scalable, especially as more people have their hands in the system. It became something people were getting lost in.”
They lost time hunting for images
That only got worse as RJ Living took on a digital marketing agency to manage their paid advertising across search and social.
“If the agency wanted to do a campaign around dining tables, we’d have to find and cherry-pick the content to give them, rather than them being able to go and search for ‘dining tables’ and find a wide range of great images to use.”
This ultimately caused the team to waste time hunting for images, when they could have been working on new campaigns with their agencies.
The solution
Discovering alternatives to Google Drive
The team knew that Google Drive wasn’t working, but it’s tricky making the leap of faith. Many brands feel reluctant to make that jump, especially when their current system is embedded in chaos. The thought of sorting out and upheaving thousands of assets can feel overwhelming. But it was clear that the benefits of moving outweighed the risks of staying with Drive.
“The point we decided to switch was seeing Dash. We realised our current system wasn’t sustainable any more. It wasn’t letting us grow.”
Plus, Dash makes it really easy to switch from Google Drive. You can simply connect your Drive to your new Dash account and move over your folder and files. 🙌
An affordable DAM solution
Dash’s balance between time-saving functionality and affordable pricing helped get the rest of the business onboard.
“There are some really, really expensive options out there. We’re a growing business but we’re small, too. If we went with one of your competitors, it would be a case of us paying an astronomical price for functionality that wasn’t relevant to our needs. There was no way I could have built a case for that which would have been financially viable to us.”
In short: “Dash’s functionality was perfect and the price was great.”
A single source of truth for product and brand assets
Having signed RJ Living up for Dash, Nathan started moving over their existing content from Google Drive and Google Photos. He wanted to create a single source of truth for RJ Living’s visual content, where everyone could find what they want quickly..
“We wanted to centralise our content for the whole team to use. Dash makes it easy for anyone to jump in and find what they want, and get back to what they were doing. It saves downloading a 40MB TIF file from Google Drive too which staff members, especially those working from home with slower internet, really appreciate. It’s become a hub for all our images.”
Using tags and fields to make assets easy to find
One of the key benefits of Dash is the ability to organise your content in a way that works best for your brand. The best way to do that is think of how you’d typically want to search for your videos and images and create your searchable attributes around that. That’s just what RJ Living have done, and they’re a great example of how to make Dash work best for your brand.
“The lifecycle of our products is around 2-3 years so any product that goes into Dash will be tagged with the product name so we can search for it. That’s the crucial thing, not having to trawl through all the images. I don’t want to have to go through 500 images to find the 10 relevant ones!”
“We tag by product type, distinguish between styled images and pack shots, and usage rights. That last one is especially important for images that come from a photographer or an influencer. We also use things like setting a deadline on Christmas-themed logos for example - nobody wants to see those in January!”
Nathan’s recommendation to other furniture brands ✨
Dash has meant RJ Living now has a system which gives room to breathe. When everyone has access to everything they need, and don’t have to waste hours finding content, it means they’re able to focus on growing the business.
“It’s saved us countless hours. We can grow with Dash, honestly I can’t see us outgrowing this for a long time, if ever. It provides us all the functionality we need it to, and it’s saved us countless hours through various members of the team being able to access it. We found it, we love it, and I can’t see any reason why we won’t keep building on it.”
Would Nathan recommend Dash to other ambitious DTC brands like RJ Living?
“I would, definitely. If you’re a business creating a lot of content it’s the perfect place to centralise everything. Plus it’s really adaptable to different ways businesses might want to use it. It’s not a one-size fits all.”
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