Kind Snacks

Challenges

With up to 15 unique product lines featuring several flavors and hundreds of unique ingredients, KIND Snacks generates tremendous amounts of creative content from packaging design files to marketing materials.

Their brand is among one of the most recognizable in the grocery store, and they have quickly become a market leader in their industry due to their excellent branding. Their transparent packaging mirrors their commitment to clarity in the ingredients they use and has allowed them to quickly and seamlessly communicate their core values to the consumer.

While the brand succeeded, however, KIND was finding they had a problem: they had no where to store, sort, and access all the creative assets they were creating. They needed a space to house all their creative content that had been so integral to the company’s success so that it could be accessed, searched for, found, shared, and downloaded in a simple and secure way.

Objectives

Security

Decrease the vulnerability of the KIND brand and its extremely valuable assets to breach and theft and ensure that assets are shared, stored, and accessed safely, securely, and by the appropriate groups.

Identification

Enable the clear identification and simple search of unique design files and creative content, as well as increase the confidence of the team while navigating the DAM and searching for assets

Centralization

Collect all valuable creative, design, and marketing assets into a shared space for convenient access, enterprise-wide search capability, practical storage, and general understanding of workflow

Scalability

Ensure the capacity, structure, and standardization within the DAM allows for the generation and continuous upload of more and more content from a rapidly-growing business

Solution

Standards and Goals

The Stacks team knew from experience that a DAM platform itself would not solve the issues that KIND was facing. In order to effectively implement a new platform and maintain it, standards had to be created and goals for the new platform set. Together with a set of key stakeholders from KIND, the team identified 4 key standards to establish:

• A future-focused folder structure that used internal language. This would allow for seamless navigation of the DAM and natural growth on the platform for years to come.
• A controlled internal vocabulary for metadata tagging and searches. These came in the form of a master keyword list of 110 keywords that was segmented by product, ingredients, packaging, product description, and nutrition facts.
• A file naming convention that would allow for straightforward organization within the folder structure and a more effective search function.
• A clearly-defined permissions tree to keep important assets and the brand as a whole safe from breach.

These standards were created by KIND’s stakeholders using KIND’s internal language with the help and expertise of the Stacks team and formalized into a Best Practice Guide that could easily be distributed across the organization or handed to newcomers to the company.

Application & Execution:

Once these standards were created and key objectives for the DAM identified, the Stacks team got to work applying keywords, renaming files, and building out KIND’s folder structure in the DAM. In all, the Stacks team curated nearly 3,000 unique design assets in a matter of weeks, and quickly began uploading assets to the freshly-created folder structure.

Finally, a top-to-bottom quality control check was executed to ensure that standards were applied the right way. At this step, folders and sub-folders had security and permissions added to them so that they would not be vulnerable at any point in the project. Throughout these processes, the KIND team validated all work the Stacks team was doing, and in the end were handed a clean, populated, scalable DAM platform to meet their current and future needs.

Benefits

Single source of truth:

With the creation, formalization, and application of metadata, organizational, and security standards, along with the centralization of assets from across the business, KIND now has a singular “Source of Truth”. This means that data and knowledge are no longer spread across the business and access to them is not limited to a few select departments or managers, but that all team members have appropriate access to understand how assets are tagged and searched for, where they are located, and who has access to them.

Ease of use:

Creating new workflows can be a huge project, especially when it comes to updating and training the team executing it. Luckily for KIND, Stacks did the heavy lifting. KIND’s key stakeholders developed the workflow, organization, and internal language themselves while the Stacks team facilitated the discussion and added advice. Now, KIND has a formalized document that can be handed to new hires or current users of the platform. The Stacks team’s work to apply metadata, migrate assets, and create the folder structure left KIND with a fully-functioning and up-to-date DAM.

Growth opportunity:

Before creating standards, organizing assets, and moving to a DAM platform, KIND’s growth as a brand was adding to the problem they faced. The more new assets that were created, the larger the pile to search through, the greater the security risk, and the worse the headache to move one day. Now, the success of KIND’s products in the market, the development of new product lines, and the generation of fresh, excellent content is something to be celebrated. The KIND brand has room to grow, and a clean platform and standardized process that will grow alongside it.