drove a 20% increase in conversion rate and approximately $1M in additional revenue
through workflow automation, freeing the team to focus on creative execution
Cloudinary has never gone down during a high-velocity sale
ABOUT
AG Jeans is a premium denim and knitwear brand committed to quality and sustainability. The California-based company engages customers across its digital channels using authentic, elegant visual stories featuring seasonal narratives, style edits, and expert tips. Cloudinary plays a critical role in that strategy — enabling AG Jeans to deliver optimized, fast-loading media across all devices and channels, including its two Shopify stores. By reducing page load times and improving the mobile experience, Cloudinary helped drive a 20% increase in conversion rate. AG Jeans also uses Cloudinary’s AI-powered tools and intelligent metadata to manage global assets, ensuring brand consistency and compliance across its wholesale partner network.
“Our creative director, Charles Sands, brought real evolution to AG Jeans around visual storytelling and a commitment to constantly evolving the brand while staying true to its California roots. Every season his team creates visual stories that define the brand, creating a rich and authentic experience for our customers. Cloudinary has been a fantastic counterpart to that creative vision helping us bring these stories to life beautifully and efficiently.”
—Milosh Nikodijevic, Product Manager, E-commerce Technology, AG Jeans
THE CHALLENGE
As AG Jeans built its brand around commitment to quality and visual storytelling, its legacy infrastructure was struggling to support it. Siloed storage, video hosting, CDN services, and manual Shopify workflows created bottlenecks that slowed time to market. The team had been relying on a separate platform for video hosting and a separate CDN for delivering images. This fragmented setup forced creators to upload assets to multiple platforms, increasing workflow complexity and delaying content delivery.
As Nikodijevic explains: “Our team shoots every week and produces thousands of images and assets. In the past, those files would sit in storage systems with little or no metadata. They had no understanding of themselves.” Without structured metadata, the team had no efficient way to search by SKU, season or category, identify featured products, track which model appeared in an image, or monitor when usage rights would expire.
Managing assets for wholesale partners was also an operational challenge. “Previously, studio coordinators would have to create asset selections for each account manager, process requests manually, and manage distribution,” explains Nikodijevic. When delays occurred, retailers would often resort to photographing products themselves, creating inconsistencies with AG Jeans’ brand guidelines.
Seeking to overcome these operational challenges, AG Jeans sought a DAM solution that could integrate with Shopify. With most vendors providing only raw APIs, however, the brand’s lean engineering team was reluctant to embark on custom integration.
“Cloudinary stood out from the pack because they said, ‘Yes, we’re API-based. What you’re looking for can absolutely be done, and we’re willing to build it with you.’ That’s really how the journey started.”
—Milosh Nikodijevic, Product Manager, E-commerce Technology, AG Jeans
THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION
With Cloudinary, AG Jeans consolidated all its disconnected asset delivery and storage tools into a single platform for images and video. To connect its DAM directly to AG Jeans’ Shopify stores — both its main and outlet sites — Cloudinary built a custom workflow using MediaFlows, its low-code workflow automation platform, enabling the team to link visual assets to Shopify and automate processes including auto-cropping, resizing, metadata tagging, and asset delivery. The solution was later developed into the official Cloudinary AssetLink app, now available to all Shopify merchants.
The transformation went beyond workflow. As Nikodijevic puts it: “Now, a photo knows a great deal about itself. It knows who’s in the image, where it was taken, when model rights expire, and which products appear in the shot.” With Cloudinary, AG Jeans captures around 20+ points of structured metadata per asset, essential for its e-commerce workflows, where Cloudinary automatically crops model images above the eyes to meet licensing and compliance requirements, a process that previously required hours of manual work per week.
“Cloudinary’s AssetLink app picks up all the information in the DAM on a per-asset basis and brings it into Shopify. It acts as a vehicle for enriching your metafields or tags – or not, if you prefer. With just one click you can either bring over the asset itself and leave the additional information in the DAM, or, bring all of that data into Shopify.”
—Milosh Nikodijevic, Product Manager, E-commerce Technology, AG Jeans
THE RESULTS
By using Cloudinary, AG Jeans solved its image- and video-related challenges and got the right visual media infrastructure in place to fully support its creative vision. What customers see on the frontend, the beautiful photography and videos that drive engagement and conversions, is powered by Cloudinary’s intelligence behind the scenes. The result is not only a highly engaging customer experience but also measurable business impact: “One of the biggest improvements came from reducing page load times,” states Nikodijevic.
“By leveraging Cloudinary’s highly optimized image and video formats, adapted to each device and connection speed, we were able to deliver a much more immediate experience. Simply reducing page load time by one second resulted in approximately 20% year-over-year growth in conversion rate.”
Other improvements include the elimination of the wholesale bottleneck. What was once an unpopular manual task that ate 10-18 hours per week for studio coordinators, is now largely automated. Time they can spend on the creative process. Instead, account managers use Cloudinary to share SKU-matched, high-quality campaign assets with their wholesale partners, ensuring in-time delivery and creative control across its channels.
Cloudinary also ensures peak-demand reliability during business-critical high-traffic spikes like Black Friday weekend. The team no longer worries about uptime or video buffering or slow-loading images as Cloudinary’s infrastructure delivers resilient, instant-playing, cinematic video and imagery flawlessly under peak volume.
“Various aspects of the e-commerce ecosystem have struggled under peak demand. With Cloudinary, we no longer have those concerns in relation to images and videos. Cloudinary’s AWS-based infrastructure has proven to be extremely reliable and doesn’t have any history of outages. So while we closely monitor many parts of our tech-stack during Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales period, delivering our images and videos isn’t one of them.”
—Milosh Nikodijevic, Product Manager, E-commerce Technology, AG Jeans
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