Stacks turned 8 on October 26. Today we're a DAM consulting firm that helps organizations organize, manage and get more from their images, video and brand assets, but it all started with a question CEO Casey Templeton asked his own photography clients: what happens to your assets if I'm not here tomorrow? Here's how a commercial photographer ended up building a DAM company, in his own words.
It Started with Seeing in Layers
Casey picked up a camera in middle school, and it came naturally. "I see in layers," he said. "So when I picked up a camera, it all just kind of made sense." By high school, he was the local sports photographer for Lifetouch, the yearbook company, covering every JV and varsity team at every school in the area. He kept shooting in college, this time for organizations like The New York Times and the Associated Press, and a year of that work earned him the title of College Photographer of the Year in 2005. The competition is judged on a full portfolio against undergraduate and graduate students from around the world, and winning it led to an internship at National Geographic, where he went on to work.
Choosing Business, and Family, Over the Magazine Life
For a lot of photographers, National Geographic is the dream. For Casey, it showed him something about himself. "I love business more than I love the art of photography," he said. A magazine career would also have meant long stretches away from his wife and family, so he turned to commercial photography instead, where he could "tell stories and build image libraries for businesses." He's never stopped. "When I'm out of office, most of the time it's for a photo shoot," he said. You can see his work at Casey Templeton Photography.
The Photographer Who Delivered Everything Through a DAM
Casey didn't want to just hand clients a folder of photos and walk away. He wanted the experience after a shoot to be as good as the shoot itself, so he started delivering all of his work through his own DAM, organized by shoot, office location and year. "All of it was so easy to navigate," he said. Clients stayed with him for 5, 10, even 15 years, and every photo he'd taken for them was right where they expected it. Over time, the data showed him something he hadn't planned for. People were downloading images from all over the country, and nobody was moving them into a system of their own. "They were using my system as their central hub for their marketing," he said.
The Question That Started Stacks
That realization turned serious when Casey faced some health issues of his own. He started asking his clients a hard question: "What happens if I turn this off? Or what happens if I get hit by a bus?" Their answer was that their whole team would lose the place they went to for everything. "I said, well, that's only my images," Casey said. "It's not your content from all of your other creative partners and all your other teams." The problem was bigger than one photographer. These companies didn't own the place their assets lived, and a contractor could have turned it off at any time. Casey kept coming back to one question: "How do I create something that if I'm not here tomorrow, everything still works properly?" So he offered his clients something new. "Would it be helpful if I created a curated experience, but with much more than just my content?" he asked. "And they said, yes, please!" Stacks' first clients were Casey's photo clients. He took on years of archives and assets scattered across their servers and shared drives, set each company up in a DAM of its own on whatever platform it chose, and then designed and organized it for them. "We essentially handed the keys to them to have their own digital asset management platform," he said. "That's really what we've been building off of for the past 8 years."
The Problem Is Bigger Than You'd Think
You'd expect the biggest brands to have this figured out, and many of Casey's photo clients were Fortune 500 companies. Early on, though, plenty of them were making do with Dropbox or OneDrive. "The fact they didn't have those tools made a much bigger issue for them," Casey said. "But also, they didn't know." That's changed. Today, every one of Casey's photo clients knows what a DAM is, and he has personally helped a third of them get into a DAM or keep theirs running. Across the industry, there's still a long way to go: Casey estimates that 80% of professionals still don't know what DAM even stands for. AI is making the problem more urgent. "AI is helping businesses create content at an impressive rate," Casey said. "But if that content isn't managed, it just puts them farther and farther underwater." More content means more to organize, find, approve and protect, and that's the work we do every day here at Stacks.
Still on the Other Side of the Camera
Casey's photography isn't a side story, either. It shapes how Stacks works. "I'm seeing the whole other side of the content management house," he said. "I'm on the other sideline, seeing it from their perspective. And so it helps us create solutions and services that are actually needed."
It's Not Too Late to Get Organized
If your library feels too big or too messy to fix, Casey's advice is simple: "There's no better time than today to get started." Waiting only puts teams further behind, he said, "and I think they need to understand that as far behind as they think they might be, they really aren't." If you're asking the question at all, you're probably ahead of most companies. Whether you're a global brand still running on shared drives or a small team that needs an extra set of hands, Stacks can help you get organized and keep it running, through DAM implementations and Fractional DAM Management.
What Would the Younger Casey Think?
We asked Casey what the photographer he used to be would think of Stacks today. "I think he'd be blown away by how big the opportunity still is, 8 years into it," he said. He'd also be amazed by who Stacks has been able to help: "We've probably touched over 300 different brands, which I never would have worked with as a photographer." Happy 8th birthday, Stacks. Thank you to our clients, our partners and our team for every one of those years. Here's to what's next. Where DAM Gets Done.
FAQs
How did Stacks get started?
Stacks started with Casey Templeton's commercial photography clients. Casey delivered his photos through his own DAM, and when he realized clients were relying on it as their main marketing hub, he started helping them set up and run DAMs of their own. That became Stacks in 2018.
What does Stacks do?
Stacks is a Content Operations consulting firm founded in DAM. We help organizations plan, implement and run their digital asset management programs, from taxonomy and metadata to governance and Fractional DAM Management. We are platform-agnostic when choosing and platform-fluent when building. Since 2018: 300+ DAM initiatives.
Is it too late for my company to get a DAM?
No. As Casey puts it, there's no better time than today to get started. Most teams are less far behind than they think, and a DAM consultant can help you start small and build from there.
