American Leather is known for its speed. The luxury furniture manufacturer can build and ship out furniture within 21 days. But until recently, the 30 year old brand’s marketing team was bogged down with slow processes that couldn’t keep up.
Senior Digital Marketing Specialist Maggie Gala and her small team are responsible for serving American Leather’s 700+ retailers across North America, from mom-and-pops to major department stores like Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. They provide fresh, sleek imagery of American Leather’s furniture for marketing, PR, social, websites and more on a regular basis. The brand is constantly adding new products to its inventory – in just the last few months, they’ve added 9 new types of recliners.
The team tried using Amazon S3 and Dropbox to organize and distribute all of their photos, videos, brochures, and other content to showcase American Leather’s ever-growing collection, but without easy search the process was unorganized and inefficient.
“It would take 6 hours to get everything set up – a waste of my entire day,” says Maggie.
Maggie set out to find a easier solution, and settled on PhotoShelter in early 2020 – right before unexpectedly going completely remote.
“COVID hit, we all ended up having to work from home, and it completely turned our entire marketing processes on their heads,” she explains.
The industry’s biggest tradeshow of the year was canceled, and Maggie and her team realized PhotoShelter would be key to introducing new products to partners.
“The entire purpose of everybody being able to use this tool has been totally amplified,” says Maggie.
They quickly uploaded more than 2,500 images and brochures, tagging each one with specific metadata like style and cover. Since they have an extensive approval process, they used Workspaces – a new collaboration tool perfect for remote teams – to vet each image.
“While we were trying to figure out how to work together as a team, there was a lot of trial and error – and a lot of errors,” says Maggie. “I noticed that Workspaces had popped up on our PhotoShelter account, and it really was able to take a very long collaborative process and turn it around and make it much easier.”
Once the images were approved, they were moved to easily accessible galleries where partners can search and find what they need.
“The adoption rate has been incredible,” says Maggie. “Previous to getting this platform, we were having almost daily emails from our reps or the retail stores themselves asking if we had some image. We’ve put ourselves in a position where we’re not getting those emails anymore.”
Now, Maggie and her team are finding new ways to streamline their workflow with PhotoShelter, like cutting out steps in their approval process for print ads and speeding up their day-to-day routines.
Want to learn more about how Maggie and her team are saving time? Watch the clip below to go behind the scenes with Maggie during our webinar, Workspaces: How to Get Creative with Our New Collaboration Tool, and watch the full on-demand webinar with Q&A here.
Want to check out PhotoShelter for Brands? See how your team can start saving time today.
