Zeal Optics Powers Global Asset Distribution to 3,000+ Retailers With Brandfolder

Challenge

Before Brandfolder, the 12-person team at Zeal Optics utilized a variety of unreliable shared drives that made it difficult to organize, find and share the digital assets their 3,000+ international retail partners needed to do business. Over time their asset sprawl had become more and more chaotic, developing into a major issue. Some of the key pain points the Zeal Optics team experienced include:

• Limited functionality sharing large assets with partners
• Inefficient sharing of assets with internal and external partners
• Repeat updates to crucial pricing documents
• Trouble collaborating with global retail partners
• Finite capacity for storing thousands of assets
• Inconsistent brand usage among partners
• Lack of control around usage rights

For example, the lack of a centralized digital asset management (DAM) system led to their sales teams’ taking content creation into their own hands, which in turn hurt their brand’s consistency with messaging and imagery.

Brand consistency and reputation is important to many organizations and is especially essential to an organization like Zeal Optics. As a growing business, Zeal needed to be recognized and trusted on an international scale in order to raise awareness for its mission-based eyewear company. After the company was acquired in 2010 by Maui Jim, growth accelerated and the Zeal team decided it was time to invest in a centralized DAM tool to solidify its brand identity; this led them to Brandfolder.

Solution

After conducting an RFP, the leadership team chose Brandfolder based on its simplicity and ease of use. Once Brandfolder was implemented at Zeal, it was a relief for their 12-person team, who could now distribute assets easily and efficiently to their sales reps and 3,000+ (and growing!) global retail partners.

“Brandfolder has made us a lot more efficient in our work. We are a global company, so by having our marketing assets on Brandfolder, we can share them internationally very quickly.” – Ben Peters, President, Zeal Optics

Brandfolder’s ease of use and user-friendly UI has made it possible for its internal sales team and external distributors to adopt the new tool. Every month, they include a shared link to their assets as well as a Brandfolder Portal to access new sales tools. They also conduct annual sales training sessions for new employees. “I know Brandfolder is working well for us because I receive fewer emailed requests and see more people downloading the assets from our share links,” Zach Riesche, marketing specialist, explains. With Brand Intelligence, their team can look into the analytics and learn which assets are the most popular and where there are gaps in their marketing materials. Even expanding into new countries where there is a language barrier has been easy because of how visual the user interface of Brandfolder is for its partners and distributors to understand where to go to find the assets they need.

“It’s insane how many assets like sales collateral we have to send out to our global customers several times a year. I can’t imagine not having Brandfolder.” – Zach Riesche, Marketing Specialist

Overall, Zeal’s process has become more streamlined and optimized, with a single source of truth that houses all of its digital assets, allowing its team to save hundreds of hours per year. Because of all this free time on its hands, Zeal Optics has been empowered to stay true to its brand pillars. How does Zeal use less, give back and explore more with Brandfolder?

• It’s able to use less paper by having digital versions of its prospecting and sales enablement tools (think product catalogs, trifolds and one-sheeters)
• It can give back from the money it’s saved from printing costs
• The team at Zeal is enabled to explore more in the great outdoors as well as develop more innovative products from all the time they’ve saved with Brandfolder

“Exploring more means pushing exploration boundaries in the outdoors and internally developing better products and processes as well as reducing our footprint. Having more time to focus on those things not only helps us to have more work-life balance, but it also lets us focus on strategic aspects of the business versus just churning out document requests.” – Mike Lewis, Director of Marketing

With Brandfolder, Zeal will be expanding into new global territories offering localized sales tools for its specific region and language and will continue to organize, share and distribute assets easily and quickly.

Interested in learning how Brandfolder can help you manage, distribute and analyze your brand assets?