70-80% reduction
in page load time
3x faster process
for launching new product lines
Streamlined workflow
with a single source of truth
WingTai Asia Fashions Efficient Media Management with Cloudinary
When managing e-commerce and retail for several of the major clothing brands it represents in Singapore and Malaysia — including Adidas, Topshop, and Cath Kidston — WingTai Asia needed to make sure it was evolving with constantly changing trends and technologies. Instead of hiring an army of people to manage images, the company implemented the Cloudinary solution, which improved team efficiency, accelerated time to market for new product lines, and helped the company address user-generated images for a new social commerce experience, MoodRoom.com.
Industry
Retail and Consumer Goods
Headquarters
Singapore
Employees
2,000
“With modern technology and the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Instagram leading the charge with their huge engineering resources, customers have a very high baseline for high-performance experiences. Since rich media is 80% of the page load, we needed a DAM that can deliver optimized, responsive experiences, in addition to efficiently managing digital assets.”
—Roy Saadon, VP and Head of Product Technology, WingTai Asia
ABOUT
WingTai Asia
WingTai Asia is a subsidiary of Wing Tai Holdings Limited, an investment holding company with a key focus on growth markets in Asia, with assets exceeding S$4.5 billion. WingTai Asia’s core business is in property investment and development, lifestyle retail, and hospitality management in key Asian markets. Currently, the company is rolling out e-commerce and brick and mortar stores selling brands such Adidas, Topshop, and Cath Kidston, as well as a social commerce fashion site MoodRoom.com.
THE CHALLENGE
Image Management and Transformation for New E-commerce Sites
WingTai Asia is a licensed distributor or sole licensed distributor for many lifestyle retail brands, such as Adidas, Cath Kidston, TopShop, UNIQLO, which operates brick and mortar shops to sell these goods throughout Singapore and Malaysia.
The company began building a digital organization in 2018 to guide the launch of an e-commerce business for these retail brands.
“While the online sales were expected to be just a small part of the business, the organization sought to make a long-term investment in creating an ecosystem that would support eCommerce for these brands,” says the VP and Head of Product Technology at WingTai Asia.
At the same time, the company was developing a separate social commerce site called MoodRoom.com, designed to enable visitors to connect and discuss fashion trends, upload photos of their own outfits, and then show visitors where they can buy similar styles.
Managing the thousands of media assets provided by the brands was labor-intensive, since each image needed to be downloaded, photoshopped, and then stored on individual team members’ laptops, so they could be used for social, marketing campaigns, promotions, or other purposes.
Dealing with user-generated content (UGC) added another layer of complexity, because they needed to be sure that they could be displayed seamlessly and be tagged for search and to align with products available for purchase.
“Because they worked on images locally, managing assets was a nightmare. We were constantly emailing images back and forth, modifying them and then emailing them back. And if assets were appearing in different places, you’d need to have many copies in different sizes, and optimize them for mobile devices.”
—Roy Saadon, VP and Head of Product Technology, WingTai Asia
THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION
Efficient Workflow and Improved Organization
“We had two options, one path was to build it ourselves and the second was to find some ready-made solution in the market. Like anything in business and technology there is the ROI consideration — DIY is heavy on resources but fits like a glove, and off-the-shelf is minimal on resources but likely not going to fit all your needs,” says WingTai Asia’s VP and Head of Product Technology.
“Surprisingly enough, we realized that you can get the best of both worlds with Cloudinary’s rich feature set and the fantastic team behind the product, who are always willing to go the extra mile to work together with their clients to build a better platform for everyone.”
In seeking a digital asset management (DAM) system to help organize images and other media, WingTai Asia selected Cloudinary because “it offered an open platform, using APIs that gave us a lot of the operational efficiency issues in terms of coding around the platform, as well as flexibility for our developers,” he notes.
WingTai Asia manages a variety of media assets that come from various places. First there are the images that the brands provide, uploaded by FTP, imported into Cloudinary and matched with contextual content to create metadata around the assets. Then there are images coming from freelancers and UGC destined for MoodRoom.com.
In the world of fast fashion, where each brand may have 2,000 items coming out as often as two to four times per year, WingTai Asia needed to constantly update its sites with new images, and be able to identify them by the SKU, season, brand, color, and other features. Cloudinary made it easy to tag each image, allowing brand managers to easily search for and quickly access the images when needed.
Cloudinary also enabled WingTai Asia to automate transformations, ensuring images were cropped and resized optimally and overlays were applied dynamically, depending on the use case and viewing device.
“It’s very minimal work once the images are in Cloudinary. You don’t need to retouch individual assets because transformations are applied automatically and you don’t need to change anything to support responsive designs of the website because that also is applied automatically as part of the transformations.”
—Roy Saadon, VP and Head of Product Technology, WingTai Asia
THE RESULTS
Keeping Pace With Fast Fashion
WingTai Asia can do more with less thanks to Cloudinary. With a conventional DAM and manual processes, it could take more than three weeks to get all the images ready and online, compared to just days with Cloudinary.
Also, the reliance on tagging and metadata, and the ease of searchability in the Cloudinary system, takes a process that “was quite lengthy and manual and turned it into one that takes only a few minutes to find the right assets,” he adds. “When we were just using a file system, before moving to Cloudinary, this process was close to impossible.”
Plus, these features also make it easy for stylists to create new outfits to display using the current inventory. Instead of browsing through hundreds of tops and pants, they can easily find pieces of a certain color, fabric, or style.
“If you support multiple brands, without Cloudinary you would need an army of people to manage all the images of the products each season, since there’s a standard operating procedure about cropping, rounding corners, centering the face, and making other changes. It’s not just about the amount of people you need, it’s also about how much time you’re investing for preparing the media to go live on the site and reviewing them for quality control.”
—Roy Saadon, VP and Head of Product Technology, WingTai Asia
Cloudinary also is helping WingTai Asia look to the future, through AI and other technology on its product roadmap. “Let’s say tomorrow a new iPhone is introduced, and the form factor is different from other screen sizes,” WingTai’s VP and Head of Product Technology notes. “Cloudinary eliminates the need to go and create a new version of every image to be optimized for that new phone. All we do is create a new transformation, and those iPhone users will automatically receive the asset delivered in an optimized, responsive way.”
He also appreciates the partnership that WingTai Asia has formed with Cloudinary. “Rather than treating us like just another customer, Cloudinary seeks out what works for both sides, and shares its clear vision about the new product features and improvements that are coming in the future. This helps us think about new, exciting ways that we can expand our use of Cloudinary and be more innovative in our eCommerce sites.”
With Cloudinary, WingTai Asia now has the agility and flexibility to ensure that it can keep up with changing trends and technologies.
“Cloudinary is probably the best DAM solution in the market today for building, managing, and delivering responsive media experiences.”
—Roy Saadon, VP and Head of Product Technology, WingTai Asia
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