Founded in Paris in 1948, Longchamp is a family-owned fashion house that is renowned for its luxury leather goods, as well as handbags, luggage, shoes, and women’s ready-to-wear.
Building a global reputation through its exceptional leatherworking and high-quality fashion products, the French Maison has approximately 1,300 physical locations across 80 countries, as well as managing 20 e-commerce channels and 100 partner sites.
As with any modern fashion brand, standing out from the crowd and staying competitive isn’t only dependent on the quality of their products. It’s also how they market them. To meet their exacting brand standards, Longchamp needed a solution that could transform how they managed digital content – particularly imagery – and ultimately get more value from their creative and marketing efforts.
Previous challenges
Before Bynder, there was no clear process for managing assets among Longchamp’s 3,000+ employees. Content was spread across personal desktops, hard drives, and multiple cloud storage solutions. This not only made it difficult to find assets, but share them too – a major hindrance in the fast-moving fashion industry that is heavily dependent on imagery to fuel its marketing and sales.
Longchamp releases two seasonal collections per year, each of which is supported by approximately 6,000 digital assets – from product packshots to social media visuals. Without a central space to store and access this content, Longchamp knew they weren’t able to market and sell their collections effectively. On top of the missed ROI, their previous ways of storing files were a major concern when it came to security and confidentiality, too.
Imagery is part of our heritage: Product photos, event photos, campaign content, partnerships, and so on. So we absolutely had to ensure open and secure access to our imagery, establish clear usage rights, and ensure everyone who needs them could do so easily.Véronique Gaudiot
Project Director at Longchamp
Getting organized with DAM
Bringing together a dedicated DAM project team internally and with the help of external consultants, Longchamp selected Bynder as their DAM-of-choice to transform the brand’s content operations and create a secure, single source of truth for company assets.
Working closely with Bynder’s onboarding experts, Longchamp was keen to set a strong foundation that ensured a smooth migration with minimal disruption to their fast-paced marketing operations. To facilitate this process, Longchamp worked with a local French integration partner of Bynder, Activo, who was able to advise them on how to migrate the brand’s 25,000+ digital assets that were previously spread across multiple storage systems.
A customized file taxonomy for the Bynder portal was also created that fit the company’s "lingua franca", so users could find what they needed intuitively, and in keeping with brand terminology.
We wanted a taxonomy that answered the needs of every user in French and English, and valid for every asset type – from product sketches to campaign imagery.Véronique Gaudiot
Project Director at Longchamp
Likewise, setting up clear digital rights management for finalized assets was a big priority for Longchamp. That way, they could tweak who could access particular assets, and specify how they could be used in the portal (internal only, expiration dates, copyrights, photography metadata, etc).
Step-by-step, Longchamp successfully migrated tens of thousands of digital assets to Bynder and hundreds of users, gradually fine-tuning and building up its use case to ensure maximum adoption across the company.
Getting results: The benefits with Bynder
Still early in their DAM journey, Longchamp are already getting huge results using Bynder’s digital asset management solution.
300 users and 40,000+ digital assets have been brought into the Bynder portal, giving cross-functional teams one secure, easy-to-use solution for quickly accessing and distributing publish-ready assets.
The autonomy it has given teams means less time is spent on back-and-forth requests and endless searching for the right image – a major benefit for a brand working towards so many time-sensitive deadlines.
What we like about Bynder is that we can really customize our homepage, like using our own brand colors. At the same time, using the solution is extremely simple and immediately understandable to everyone.Véronique Gaudiot
Project Director at Longchamp
Longchamp estimates they’re making resource savings equivalent to 3 FTE employees per week based on how much quicker they are finding and sharing content, before and after Bynder.
Next steps: Building a digital ecosystem
Longchamp recently brought on Bynder’s Asset Workflow module to facilitate creative projects with external agencies and photographers, who are tasked with much of the brand’s content production. Integrated with the DAM, Longchamp is now able to brief, review, and approve campaign materials and brand imagery in a fraction of the time.
Collaboration between third parties is centralized, time-to-market is quicker, and the brand is ultimately better equipped to track and meet its deadlines for the release of new seasonal collections.
With its 20 e-commerce channels, Longchamp is also making plans to integrate Bynder with a PIM solution, which will significantly speed up the process of creating, maintaining, and using product descriptions and specifications for the brand’s online and offline product catalogs.
Following on from this, we're going to take a step forward by integrating the DAM with our e-commerce platforms. We're moving towards ever-greater complexity, and little by little, we're integrating more of our digital ecosystem.
Book a demo and see what Bynder can do for you
Over 4000 organizations worldwide are conquering the complexity and chaos of proliferating content with Bynder’s powerful, intuitive, and richly integrated DAM platform. From centralized file storage and secure asset sharing to better brand consistency and project collaboration, we have a tailored solution to fit the needs of each and every customer. Why not see what Bynder can do for you with a free demo?
