Lindsay Stuart • Oct 2nd, 2018
eSalon is an online hair color company that has single-handedly bridged the gap between salon and boxed dye. They are the first and only brand to provide custom, made-to-order hair color for home application. With most of the day to day creative for the brand being handled in-house, eSalon was confronted with a challenge many growing teams face: it was becoming too hard and taking too long for team members to quickly and easily find the digital assets they needed to do their jobs.
Finding the Right Solution
eSalon’s asset library was growing exponentially as they produced an increasing amount of content from photo shoots, video shoots and brand-specific items like icons and logos. The software they were using for organizing and distributing assets presented two key challenges:
eSalon needed a better option — one that would make the process of viewing and sharing across the organization more efficient and provide critical context for using assets correctly across a wide range of projects.
Organizing a Digital Library in Lingo
With Lingo, eSalon found a solution that addressed their pain points by making assets easier to find, share, use and understand. eSalon began the process of assembling their library by focusing on the most frequently requested digital assets — model and product photography. Using Lingo’s Mac app, the eSalon team created a Kit named “Photography” and added their model and product shots. Once the photos were inside the Kit, eSalon took advantage of Lingo’s flexibility and organized their photos into different sections, resulting in a library that was effortless to visually browse. Once the photos were organized, tags were added to make them easily discoverable through search.
Next, the team created a Brand Toolkit for eSalon Brand guidelines, which included logos, colors, icons, patterns and more. In this Kit, eSalon once again took advantage of Lingo’s flexibility by controlling how their assets were displayed and arranged, and by adding notes about usage directly alongside the assets. This resulted in a Kit that was part asset library, part style guide. Anyone pulling assets from the Kit would have the necessary contextual information to use the assets correctly.
The team then went on to create additional Kits for their email templates, videos and standard copy documents. The goal throughout this process was to create a single resource that would be the gateway to all visuals designed and created by the eSalon Brand/Marketing team.
Once the asset library was assembled and organized in Lingo, team members outside of the Creative team were invited to the library. Because Lingo has robust roles and permissions, it was easy to control which members could access and edit each Kit. Ultimately, the eSalon library was distributed cross-functionally to 7 different teams throughout their organization.
Increasing Efficiency and Productivity
Access to Lingo has allowed the entire eSalon team, not just those with graphic design skills, to quickly and easily locate assets for use across a wide range of projects. Since implementing Lingo as their solution of choice, the amount of time it takes the eSalon team to find and retrieve assets has decreased dramatically. Asset requests have also decreased in frequency from daily to just weekly. Being able to search for assets and copy documents through Lingo’s search feature has also saved project managers hours of time that they would have otherwise used to comb through various folders. At eSalon, everyone works cross-functionally and there are many teams that need assets. Not only does Lingo save time, but it saves those on the Creative team from having to also be asset administrators.
For brands whose digital assets feel lost in folders, Lingo is a flexible canvas that can help you showcase, organize, and share your assets. Building a single source of truth for your brand and empowering your team to create on their own while ensuring consistency at scale has never been easier.
Files hide in folders, they live in Lingo.