Mint Velvet Streamlines Image Workflow

ABOUT

Mint Velvet

Mint Velvet’s lines of premium women’s clothing are sold in boutiques throughout the U.K. and Ireland; in high-end department stores like John Lewis, House of Fraser, and Fenwick; and, of course, online.

Founded in 2009 by three senior fashion executives in 2009 “over cups of fresh mint tea” at CEO Liz Houghton’s kitchen table, the company has grown to more than 100 locations internationally. A pioneer in the online retail space, Mint Velvet began by selling its product line direct-to-consumer before opening physical stores and has long-relied on beautiful digital imagery to entice shoppers to purchase.

Recently, the brand upgraded its e-commerce site’s backend from Shopify to Shopify Plus. Additionally, Mint Velvet transformed its visual media management by replacing legacy Microsoft SharePoint with Cloudinary’s modern, API-first image and video platform. This move has freed up the retailer’s Creative and Digital Marketing teams from the constraints of an older desktop-folder-based approach to image handling and made asset sharing with key partners easier.

THE CHALLENGE

Legacy Bottlenecks, Multiple Pain Points

With an impressive track record managing large-scale, e-commerce tech stack transformations at several leading fashion houses, Peyman Naeini, Mint Velvet’s Chief Technology Officer, is focused on driving Mint Velvet’s ongoing success through continuous improvement.

A project to upgrade the firm’s core platform, Shopify, also opened the possibility of improving what was a very “clunky” process: image handling. The company had been using legacy software, Microsoft SharePoint, which was more commonly used to collaborate on documents. Adopting a modern, visual media platform that could integrate with Shopify, had been long overdue.

“We had multiple pain points,” Naeini says. “Files were getting deleted, there was no search capability, people couldn’t work on the same images, the quality of the images was not great, and it was just too slow. We needed to eliminate the time and pain involved in going from photoshoot to web.”

Ella Gardner, Mint Velvet’s Creative Production Manager, explains, “Mint Velvet is a creatively-led business — we do over 100 shoots a year — and we were struggling with folders, as each one was ending up with 500 images. Sharepoint didn’t allow us to see if any images failed to upload which was hard to manage with so many shoot folders.”

Gardner continues, “I love the way you can click ‘final image or the high res,’ which compresses it so it doesn’t build up too much storage. Before it was taking up to 15 minutes to load an image, and now it happens instantly!”

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

A Custom Shopify Integration Without the Costly Overhead

Naeini led the search for a new system for managing its visual media, which soon led to the concept of introducing Cloudinary’s AI-driven visual media capabilities and headless DAM.

Naeini liked Cloudinary’s commitment to ensuring the workflow between Cloudinary and Shopify met their specific requirements, and matched the retailer’s quality-obsessed culture.

The magic sauce for Mint Velvet proved to be Cloudinary’s prebuilt Shopify integration combined with MediaFlows, Cloudinary’s low-code solution for automating visual media workflows. By leveraging MediaFlows, Mint Velvet was able to reap all the benefits of a custom integration without the costly overhead of securing additional developer resources and going through a lengthy development process.

How It Works

The creatives at Mint Velvet upload final images to Cloudinary, which automatically sets up structured metadata that associates every new asset with a product in Shopify and then transforms, customizes, and optimizes images for every commerce channel. Once assets are ready to publish they’re automatically sent to Shopify. When changes are made in either platform, assets and metadata stay in sync through a MediaFlows-driven workflow.

‘Extra Mile’ Cloudinary Support Team Made Implementation Easy

In addition to building the custom Shopify connector, Naeini calls out Cloudinary’s support team as “really smart people who went the extra mile” to ensure the whole implementation went smoothly.

Naeini continues, “I recommend Cloudinary, not only because I never have to worry that the software works as we need it to, but also for the support people we’ve worked with. I have no doubt that Cloudinary will continue to succeed.”

THE RESULTS

Optimized Digital Asset Production

Since introducing Cloudinary, image optimization, automation, and delivery at the company has become “operationally way easier.”

Ella Gardner, Mint Velvet’s Creative Production Manager, says, “Because you set up presets for us, [we are] able to upload images so much quicker than we did previously and can create images quicker for social media purposes. We can do things in five minutes that used to take half an hour. That, and the fact we can add as many images as we want, means Cloudinary has just been really helpful.”

Naeini agrees, “Cloudinary has made image processing on the creative side here significantly easier, and more efficient, which has also helped overall website and mobile performance. So, it’s been a positive change both on the technical and the business side.”

It’s now much easier for Mint Velvet to share visual content with external audiences. These include journalists at publications like The Daily Mail, which regularly feature Mint Velvet in articles and department store partners like John Lewis, which need fashion images to publish on their websites. This process is now as simple as creating a “collection” in Cloudinary and making it shareable.

Naeini’s dedication to continuous improvement means that Mint Velvet’s journey with Cloudinary is set to involve more video and user-generated content (UGC) in the future.