The Stone Division at Boral America enables self-service access to imagery

To distribute and manage product and field photography, the Boral team initially relied on a piecemeal system of internal network drives and cloud storage to communicate with third party agencies and distributors. “In terms of sharing, all the information we had was scattered and we were using multiple platforms, so you can imagine how quickly it became chaotic,” says Roqueta.

Boral’s five stone product lines are each sold by different distributors and used by different sales and architectural teams across North America. Product lines are specific to certain regions of the country, so it’s critical that each distributor or sales representative only has access to the brands they’re working with to avoid confusion.

When the Stone Division at Boral was introduced to Canto through another division of the company that was using it to manage product photography, the team knew it would be an ideal platform to help them store everything in one place.

Getting organized

The Stone Division categorizes each photo in their library by stone brand, and then based on the type of use: interior or exterior, commercial or residential. Images are also categorized by use case and stone color. “We also ensure that each file name has the stone profile, brand name and stone color in it, so it’s easy for anyone to find the exact product they’re searching for,” Roqueta says.

“Our Canto main library is accessible only to the internal marketing team because we have a lot of photos we’re not ready to share yet. The photos that are ready get put into Canto portals,” says Roqueta. The Boral team uses four portals: one main portal for the sales team, one for PR/Communication agencies and another two that house their premier brands and are meant for access by retail distributors.

The Stone Division’s sales and architectural teams are constantly on the road working with distributors and architectural firms to get Boral brands specified on building projects across the country. With Canto portals, they can find exactly the stone, color and use case they’re looking to showcase. Canto also enables the marketing team to support architectural sales reps with the up-to-date information they need in a way that is easy for them to navigate and access.

“Our PR and social media agencies also really love Canto! We were using Dropbox with them before, and Canto is more user-friendly,” Roqueta says. “It’s easy for them to resize or change image formats in case they need something for a certain media outlet: they can just identify the size and format they need and download it directly from Canto.”

By implementing Canto, Boral established a single source for assets across internal departments, agencies and distributors. From there, they were able to provide each part of the business with self-service access to the images they need within their own Canto portals, virtually eliminating individual image requests to the marketing team.

Today, the Stone Division at Boral looks forward to expanding their library to include additional assets, like different resources and media types. As the company continues to grow, Canto will be a vital part of creating a streamlined, one-stop shop for internal team members and external retailers to access what they need to support each unique stone brands.