Scotch & Soda is a fast-growing Dutch fashion retailer founded in 1985 and headquartered in Amsterdam. Generating over €339m revenue in 2018, the label creates men’s, women’s and children’s collections stocked in over 220 boutiques and 8000 retail stores worldwide.
For Scotch & Soda, seeing is selling. Their visual imagery is a key driver of company sales and in pushing their unique brand identity, with most product images captured at a canal-side studio in Amsterdam. Their commercial teams depend on Bynder’s digital asset management (DAM) solution daily to ensure all marketing efforts run smoothly and see it as a business-critical tool to drive revenue through their B2C webstore and B2B applications.
Having so much value tied to their visual materials, Scotch & Soda’s partners, buyers, and distributors need round-the-clock, instant access to the latest content. And with the Scotch & Soda brand engaging across multiple digital touchpoints, including their social channels, webshop, and partner e-commerce sites, they need to ensure that their content is distributed automatically and reliably.
In an increasingly digital world, iconic fashion brands like Scotch & Soda demand best-in-class technology to connect brand assets and top-line revenue —key to fuelling their global growth strategy while cementing their position in an ever-changing industry.
Scotch & Soda x Bynder
When Scotch & Soda initially implemented Bynder, they were managing around 11,000 assets. Five years later, their total output has skyrocketed—despite resources remaining constant—outputting over 40,000 images annually.
To keep up with rising demand, 8,000 new clothing articles are launched per year (2,000 pieces per season), with an average of 6-8 images per item. What’s more, each product has 4-5 internal article codes—barcode, EAN code, color code, color name, and style code—a lot of data to organize, manage and keep up-to-date.
Typically, photographers create an image set for each item, which includes two asset types, flat shots and model shot.
Prior to Bynder, the management of these assets, related article codes and metadata was complex and subject to human error. Their previous system was unable to cope with the challenges of a fast-paced work environment, with product information such as new colorways changing regularly.
Centralized & accessible, direct from the Studio
Everything the photo studio team works on and all the different versions of Scotch & Soda’s assets are centralized in Bynder. That way, all assets are accessible, searchable and shareable to make sure there’s no friction when distributing to different stakeholders and retail channels.
Having it all stored in one place gives merchandisers and clients clear visibility into what new items are available in the product catalog, and customers browse for products in the webshop. On top of that, the marketing, design, and customer care teams can easily access assets for their own purposes—whether that’s for campaigns or their customer service team when following up on client requests.
Integrations
Scotch & Soda use the DAM not only for product images but also for marketing content. The platform allows them to distinguish webshop images and those that are leveraged for their sales, marketing and branding efforts. With Bynder’s API integration, asset publication to their e-commerce website is automated and there’s no risk of images being used incorrectly.
To cater to this need, Bynder integrates with Akamai, one of the world’s leading content delivery networks (CDNs) which enables automatic image update directly from their DAM onto their e-commerce site. The integration with a best-in-class CDN leads to faster loading times for all high-quality images published on Scotch & Soda and e-commerce websites.
Ultimately, Scotch & Soda have the flexibility to easily change product information and imagery as and when it’s needed, to help them maintain agility in a fast-moving marketplace.
Bynder is the most business-critical tool we use in the photo studio because it’s the closest to sales. Without Bynder, we don’t have images and ultimately products won’t sell.Niels van de Vorst
Photo Studio Manager/Team Lead at Scotch & Soda
The benefits with Bynder
Scotch & Soda need to be agile and update assets as smoothly as possible to meet the high standards that customers expect. The ability to drive the customer experience centrally for a global audience will ensure that the company can continue its global expansion while remaining true to, and strengthening, the uniqueness of its brand.
Automatic image delivery that drives revenue
With Bynder functioning as the central lynchpin between a network of supporting applications that drive Scotch & Soda’s content operations, the team doesn’t need to waste time manually distributing assets when there’s a new season, product line, or marketing campaign.
Partners & distributors have easy access to digital images
From studio to consumer, images are directly available in the DAM and all stakeholders can trust that assets are stored and ready for distribution in Bynder.
Multiple channels powered by a single set of images
Bynder ensures fast access and findability for all Scotch & Soda’s digital assets; the ability to quickly create different versions of the same image for a variety of digital channels and applications means they save time, effort and resources not having to recreate assets needlessly.
Agile asset distribution and use to keep up with customer demands
As a modern e-commerce retailer, it’s inevitable that product imagery and information will need to change—sometimes daily—to meet client requests and a changeable fashion collection. Changing the metadata behind assets to reflect these changes ensures assets are always on-brand and up-to-date.
