Dune London Finds a Perfect Fit With Cloudinary

When global luxury shoe brand The Dune Group set out to overhaul its commerce site, it encountered a major hurdle: Managing and sharing visual content from its huge digital asset library was complicated and inefficient. That meant Dune London not only needed to radically improve its outdated web platform, but also the way its teams and third-party partners, including all those within its franchise network, worked with its massive library of images and video assets. Seeking a new DAM partner, Dune London turned to Cloudinary for its innovative media experience solution and tight integration with Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

ABOUT

An Iconic Brand Modernizes Its Online Experience

In 1992, founder and owner Daniel Rubin embarked on a dream to create an affordable luxury footwear and accessories brand with a small concession store on London’s Oxford Street. The Dune Group has grown to become an influential, dynamic and internationally renowned business, designing, producing and distributing shoes and accessories on a multitude of platforms and global markets. Since setting up its online shop in 2005, the company has increasingly sought to be as meticulous about the quality of its promotional and product imagery as it is about the shoes themselves. The pandemic accelerated Dune London’s need for a website update, and Cloudinary’s DAM with its close integration with Salesforce Commerce Cloud were selected to help.

THE CHALLENGE

Major Platform Change, Big Opportunity

The momentum to replatform Dune London’s website had been building as Dune London’s online growth accelerated. Also, DAM licensing constraints made it prohibitive to connect users outside the company, so sharing visual media became a laborious, manual process. When all commerce moved online during the pandemic, Elaine Smith, Head of Digital Product, seized the chance to make changes.

In making this change, one of Dune London’s guiding principles was to give customers the same shopping experience on desktop PCs, mobiles, or tablets. In practical terms, that meant the stunning high-definition pictures, videos, and animations on Dune London’s home and product pages needed to load quickly and display consistently, regardless of browsing environment. Dune London also wanted to give customers a seamless e-commerce and international shipping experience, supporting more than 130 different countries, 70 currencies, and German and French languages.

For an edgy, modern fashion brand like Dune London, images really matter. And the company has a lot more visual media in its library than meets the eye, as Smith explains: “We rely heavily on 360s [panoramic images], which are composed of about 20 images stitched together. We’re replacing some of those with videos, but that doesn’t work for every product. Per season we can have 2-3000 products with this 360 format — and then we’ve got all the campaign imagery and assets on top of these.” Dune London also needed to give lots of users and teams (including those working at franchise operations) fast, easy, and secure access to its huge visual content library.

“We work with a growing number of third parties, from wholesale and concession to franchise partners,” comments Smith. “The way that we were sending them imagery and videos was pretty outdated and manual involving URLs on spreadsheets.

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

A Perfect Fit for All Users and Dune London’s New Tech Stack

To meet these challenges, Dune London sought a specialized DAM solution that fit into a modern web stack and was optimized for securely managing visual assets at scale. It was critical that the new DAM came with a simple UX that the company’s non-technical employees and its partners could onboard and use easily with minimal training. Fortunately, Cloudinary offered an ideal DAM solution. Cloudinary also fits perfectly with other components of Dune London’s new tech stack. Crucially, Cloudinary works seamlessly with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, feeding the product detail page image carousel and also managing all the images displayed there. Cloudinary’s interoperability with Dune London’s CMS, Page Designer (built into Salesforce Commerce Cloud), was also a welcome feature.

THE RESULTS

Striking the Right Balance With Cloudinary

Cloudinary’s DAM has helped Dune London overcome all the limitations it faced with its legacy web architecture including the crucial user access issue.

Ditching the old URL and download-clogged DAM process has also sped up production. “Replacing the old manual spreadsheet system with automation has been so welcome. I almost daren’t put a figure on the hours being saved, as it would probably be such a scary number — it’s very big!”

Cloudinary’s algorithms for image handling also help in what Smith quips is the “eternal balancing act” between fast page load and the ability to display amazing, super-high resolution product images. “Like other retailers, we do keep pushing for our homepage to load faster, but we also know that’s tricky because of the volume of content we want to put online including videos and GIFs. So, it’s a constant battle between the beautiful and the functional. Cloudinary helps us strike the optimal balance.”

Crucially, this visual media optimization extends to mobile, where 80% of Dune London’s customers shop. “The ability to automatically optimize images and videos for our users at the point they want to interact with us is really important,” Smith continues.

Perhaps most importantly, Cloudinary’s automation frees up Dune London’s creatives to spend more time on what they do best: creating cool, compelling, informative content for every stage of the customer journey to improve conversion rates.