Success story

Dia&Co

Industry:

Retail

Headquarters:

New York City, NY

Website:

dia.com

Dia&Co powers a plus-size style revolution with Canto

Dia&Co’s plus-size style subscription box helps customers express themselves with confidence. With each personally styled box of clothes and beautiful campaign celebrating body positivity, the brand expands the possibilities of fashion for plus-size women.

Grace Donnelly, the creative producer at Dia&Co, oversees the entire photo and video production process, from coordinating shoot logistics to getting the finished assets into the hands of stakeholders throughout the company. As a member of the creative team, Grace has a hand in the creation of all the assets that go on to be used by merchandising and marketing on the website, ad and email campaigns, social media and more.

The goal

As a growing startup, Dia&Co needed to unlock access to their creative assets so their team could realize their full potential.

The result

With Canto, Dia&Co’s assets help power their growth instead of slowing them down.

Goal: Enabling sustainable growth

Having a digital asset management (DAM) solution in place was always on the roadmap for Dia&Co – Grace even recalls DAM being mentioned during her interview three years ago – but the early-stage startup couldn’t justify the financial investment at first.

In the meantime, Dia&Co stored their assets in a combination of hard drives, Dropbox, Google Drive and an internal server. With each shoot resulting in anywhere from 150 to 10,000 raw photos, the creative team’s fast-paced and high volume work meant their asset library outgrew this piecemeal system in just a couple years.

“We were getting to a boiling point trying to store all of these assets as a growing startup. We were shooting a terabyte of assets a quarter and had years and years’ worth of terabytes of assets that we were trying to store in hard drives, and we reached the point where we really needed a DAM,” says Grace.

A woman wearing sportswear.

And it wasn’t just a storage issue; accessing their assets slowed down the entire company.

“We would slow down the Internet for the entire staff by trying to use the internal server. It wasn’t sustainable for us.”

Dia&Co evaluated DAM solutions and chose Canto for its rich functionality and affordable price point.

“Canto was a happy medium between pricing and functionality. The creative team was really satisfied with the service that Canto provided and we didn’t feel like we had to sacrifice what we wanted for the price. Canto had everything we needed, even though it was significantly cheaper than the other options we were exploring,” says Grace.

Enter Canto: A DAM that works

Today, Dia&Co stores around 300,000 assets in Canto, including brand and design assets, such as logos and fonts, both raw and retouched photography, e-commerce imagery, top-performing video ad campaigns and talent releases.

Dia&Co Canto Library

Getting organized

Grace onboarded the company and decided to set up the library structure in Canto to mirror the way they organized assets previously.

“Each department has a folder. Within the creative team, assets are chronologically organized by year, then by quarters, and inside each quarter we have folders for each shoot. Within each shoot, there is usually a full take folder, a retouched folder and a final selects folder,” says Grace.

A central hub for everyone

Teams across the company love having a centralized location for all their assets. Merchandising uses photos for the website, the marketing team pulls assets from Canto to use in emails and ads, HR uses Canto to grab assets for presentations.

Since Canto is easy to use, team members have taken the initiative to make Canto their own.

“Canto is digestible enough that after 15 minutes of talking through the tool, most employees are empowered to get organized and do their own work in Canto,” says Grace. “I was able to leave it up to the other teams to organize their assets under their department folder in the way that makes sense to them.”

Two plus size models posing.

Simplified sharing and collaboration

The creative team plays a central role at Dia&Co by creating assets for the rest of the company. Canto has helped streamline the way the creative team shares assets with other teams, elevating collaboration.

The creative team works with freelance photographers to shoot anywhere from 150 to 10,000 images per shoot. Grace uploads these images into Canto and shares selects with a retouching agency via a Canto portal. Once she gets the finalized, retouched photos back, she sends a Canto link to stakeholders.

Grace loves using Canto’s custom presets for downloading and exporting, which helps her save time from having to adjust each image for other team members’ requirements.

“A lot of our team is using the download and export function and Canto lets them grab images without having to get a designer to crop it in Photoshop. For example, at one time we were making regular blog posts and I set up a header compression preset and a body image preset for the editorial team,” says Grace.

An added bonus? “I think it’s making the team more appreciative of the creative process as a whole by giving them visibility into what we have to do when they ask for a crop, resize or compression,” adds Grace.

Grace Donnelly, Creative Producer at Dia&Co.

Canto was a happy medium between pricing and functionality. The creative team was really satisfied with the service that Canto provided and we didn't feel like we had to sacrifice what we wanted for the price.

Grace DonnellyCreative Producer

Results: Delivering assets to stakeholders and clothes to happy customers

Canto helps the creative team ensure that the assets they create make the biggest impact possible. The broader company is empowered to access and use their vast library of assets in Canto to reach Dia&Co’s highly engaged community and potential new customers.

“It’s important for us to make sure that all stakeholders have proper access to what the creative team is producing. For example, if we have a shoot and we spent money on retouching, we want to make sure the company uses those assets in as many ways as possible,” says Grace.

With Canto, Dia&Co’s assets are powering their growth instead of slowing them down – enabling the brand to help more women discover self expression and body positivity through their style.

A woman wearing a hooded sweater.