Babolat Aces Media Management With Cloudinary

For more than a century, Babolat has been a leader in B2B racquet sports equipment sales in France and throughout the world. But as the company began planning the redesign of its brand website to roll out its B2C e-commerce business, it knew it needed a digital asset management (DAM) solution to be at the center of these changes and digital transformation. Babolat selected Cloudinary for its modern approach to DAM, as well as its ability to deliver dynamic transformations of images and videos, and mobile responsiveness — all of which were critical for positioning its brand as it moved into the consumer market.

ABOUT

Babolat

Headquartered in Lyon, France, Babolat is the oldest international brand specializing in racquet sports, whose equipment is used by many of the world’s best players. Since the invention of natural gut strings for racquets in 1875, Babolat continued its long-standing tradition of innovation in support of players and the game by continuously adding racquet sport equipment to its product portfolio. Today, Babolat provides equipment for all tennis, badminton, and padel lovers.

THE CHALLENGE

Delivering Media-Rich E-commerce Experiences Globally

After more than a century of selling racquets and strings in a business-to-business model, Babolat embarked on an ambitious project to materialize its direct-to-consumer approach through the expansion of its existing model to integrate e-commerce functionalities. Planning to launch a new brand website in eight Asian and European countries in 2020 and the United States in 2021, Babolat focused on designing an e-commerce ecosystem that featured inspiring videos of top players using its gear, as well as an image-rich website that showcased its products and brand.

Knowing they would need to be able to handle a variety of assets — product images, player videos, and brand assets — Babolat’s team started researching various DAM solutions to enable efficient management with a centralized library of assets and the ability to easily share with external teams. But as they were exploring options, they also realized they needed a way to transform and optimize media, as well as deliver it seamlessly to audiences around the globe, across all the viewing devices and bandwidth. And whatever they selected would need to work with their existing deployments, including the Akeneo Product Information Management (PIM) system, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and other systems.

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

Easy Implementation and Integration

Babolat selected Cloudinary because of its diverse functionality. Not only could Cloudinary host images and videos, but its integration with content delivery networks (CDNs) also supported optimal performance for an international company targeting four continents. The ability to use URL-based automation also made it easy for the web team to manipulate and optimize images on the fly for mobile responsiveness.

Babolat has already implemented two of its initial use cases for Cloudinary, meeting the prerequisites of its website launch. The first is related to product images, such as snapshots of racquets, for which they’ve developed a specific workflow. These are implemented on the company’s SharePoint collaboration tool, then transferred to Cloudinary, where custom metadata gets added for integration with the Akeneo PIM system before being published across digital catalogs. The second use case concerns the delivery of marketing assets created and managed in the Cloudinary DAM. Babolat uses Cloudinary’s URL-based transformation capabilities to ensure each image is delivered in the right format, resolution, and quality for every user, allowing the team to launch its website content faster while still making sure the customer’s experience remains optimal.

Additionally, this process enables the team to crop images, manipulate video, and add legal disclaimers or text overlays with simple manipulation parameters. Babolat also takes advantage of Cloudinary’s automations.

THE RESULTS

Seamless Integration and Foundation for the Future

The ease of implementation and use of Cloudinary enabled Babolat to meet its timeline of launching a new website and set the stage for its entrance into the U.S. market in 2021, all this in simply six months after signing up for Cloudinary as the DAM platform.

“We still have a huge roadmap for which we want Cloudinary to be a central component,” Chareyron concludes. “Cloudinary’s 360-degree service offering provides us with what we need to continue supporting our e-commerce website, while working with distributors on the B2B side to offer them the much needed solution to take full advantage of our media content.”

Babolat’s asset lifecycle management has matured dramatically thanks to Cloudinary. The company is now looking forward to expanding the platform’s internal scope from storage and delivery to collaboration and sharing. Beyond the web team using Cloudinary for the international website rollout, Chareyron sees the potential for Babolat’s communications and marketing teams to use Cloudinary to support asset workflow, and deliver media assets to all the brand lovers worldwide: employees, distributors, retailers and, of course, consumers.