When Shared Folders Stop Working: Enstrom Candies’ Design Team on Daminion

The moment a shared drive stops being enough

Most design teams don't start out needing a DAM. One designer, one folder tree and a good memory for where things live can work for years. It stops working the day the team grows and the folders have to make sense to people who didn't build them.

That is the story in our new client story: Enstrom Candies, the Colorado confectioner behind the famous Almond Toffee, reached that point in 2018 and has run its design library on Daminion ever since.

Enstrom Candies was founded in 1960 by Chet Enstrom and his family in Grand Junction, Colorado, and is now a well-known gift brand with a range of premium chocolates. Its packaging, posters, catalogues and social media posts come from an in-house creative department — exactly the kind of design team a DAM is built for.

Three ways folders fail a growing design team

Enstrom kept its photo inventory in folders on the company's own file servers, spread across several locations. With one in-house designer that was fine. When the team expanded, the same three problems appeared that we hear from almost every creative team that has outgrown a shared drive:

1. Finding takes longer than using. Every search means clicking through a folder tree built by someone else, and the minutes add up across the whole team.
2. Nobody knows which version is current. The same image exists in several edited copies, often in several places.
3. Lost files get remade. When an image can't be found, the quickest fix is to re-edit it from scratch — and then there is one more copy.

Enstrom wanted its growing inventory in one searchable place, hosted locally rather than in a third-party cloud. That is how the team came to Daminion.

What changes when the library becomes searchable

Daminion gave Enstrom a centralized library running on its own infrastructure, and the design team's day-to-day changed in three ways:

• Search by project and photo type, not by folder path. The team structured the library with tags, metadata and categories and filters by those attributes instead of browsing. The right image is a few clicks away, even for a designer who joined last month.
• One asset, all its versions. Edited variants stay attached to the original through Daminion's version control, so nobody re-edits an image because the previous version went missing.
• A library you can see. With thumbnails of the whole inventory in front of them, designers pick assets by looking rather than from memory. Stephanie Hall, Visual Graphics Coordinator at Enstrom, says that is what lets the team be more creative: they see everything they have, not only what they remember.

The net effect, in Enstrom's words, is a lot of saved time and projects moving at a better pace.

Read the full story

The complete case study, with Stephanie Hall's comments on the before and after, is on our site: Enstrom Candies: helping designers find images without digging through folders. More stories from design, architecture, education and manufacturing teams are in our client stories.

And if you would like to see what Enstrom makes, the toffee is at enstrom.com.