Stanley Black & Decker Fastens a Frictionless Commerce Workflow

ABOUT

Stanley Black & Decker

STANLEY Engineered Fastening (SEF) is a global leader in fastening technologies and part of Stanley Black & Decker (SBD). The division operates at scale, producing over 21 billion fasteners every year for a wide range of industries. But with that scale comes e-commerce complexity. It manages a diverse mix of more than 25,000 digital assets, including product images, videos, 360-degree spinsets, and PDFs. Each needs to be properly formatted, tagged, linked to product data, and delivered across various websites and e-commerce platforms. With thousands of OEMs and distributors relying on timely, accurate content, the division’s siloed legacy digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) tools reached a point where it could no longer keep up with the pace of business.

THE CHALLENGE

Legacy Systems and Siloed, Inefficient Workflows

Teer’s team of web and digital commerce specialists had been working to digitally transform the SEF division and deliver exceptional customer experiences. They were operating in a highly fragmented digital asset landscape and slowed by too many manual processes. Business-critical visual content and product information were spread across multiple systems and locations, like SharePoint and legacy DAMs, and often lacked metadata. Updates made in one system didn’t automatically flow downstream and locating files often depended on individual knowledge, which made scaling difficult.

Design teams across regions produced visual assets, but these weren’t always web-ready and needed transformations like resizing, cropping, and format conversion. These adjustments could take days or even weeks, and with different teams handling the work, results varied in quality and style.

Publishing visual assets to websites, e-commerce platforms, and channel partner sites was beset with similar issues. It involved time-consuming manual steps, which inevitably leads to inconsistencies. In some regions, PIM (or linking visual assets to products) was done manually, which created only a temporary snapshot. Where PIMs weren’t connected to e-commerce platforms, teams had to export and reupload product data to other destinations.

With all these variables to orchestrate, over time it became an uphill and resource-intensive battle for the team to scale, while ensuring consistency. Teer’s team sought new, modern, integrated solutions to support its goals.

THE SOLUTION

From Fragmentation to Fully Integrated

The division’s first step in resolving these issues was transitioning to Syndigo’s enterprise-wide PIM system. As Syndigo’s fully embedded DAM, Cloudinary and Syndigo together addressed the division’s core challenges quickly and effectively.

Today, original files are uploaded directly into the Cloudinary DAM, freeing design teams from having to manually transform assets for web publishing. Cloudinary’s automation manages resizing, cropping, background removal, and color adjustments, streamlining workflows and ensuring consistent, high-quality results.

With Cloudinary’s DAM living inside Syndigo’s PIM, there’s no longer any need for team members to switch between multiple platforms and manual overhead is greatly reduced. With agreed-upon file naming conventions, Cloudinary automatically tags assets by SKU, brand, or type. However, if needed, users can also manually add metadata during uploads. Once assets are published, Cloudinary’s automation ensures they appear in Syndigo within seconds, linked to the correct SKUs.

The team highly values using Cloudinary’s Product Gallery Widget on product pages powered by VTEX, its digital commerce platform. By passing SKU data, the widget dynamically displays images, videos, and animations in real time. Publishing is as simple as uploading and tagging content in the DAM, which then goes live instantly on the site. Hundreds of distributors can now quickly access the assets they need, knowing the product information is correct and up to date.

THE RESULTS

Efficiency, Consistency, and Happier Teams

By leveraging a fully integrated solution with Syndigo’s PIM and Cloudinary’s DAM, SEF transformed how teams and distributors find, publish, and optimize product content. Outdated images are no longer an issue, as the system always serves the latest version of each asset. Tasks that once took days or weeks can now be completed in minutes, all within a single platform.

Cloudinary delivers far greater functionality than previous solutions, allowing teams to self-serve most image and video needs without relying on design or development support. Automation between the two systems has virtually eliminated manual errors in asset assignment.

Employee productivity has risen sharply, with asset transformation, uploading, and publishing now far faster and more consistent. Perhaps most importantly, Cloudinary’s ease of use and reliability have made it a tool that employees actually enjoy working with. This is driving adoption and making a tangible difference in daily operations.

Instead of spending hours on tedious, repetitive content management tasks, the automation is freeing up the team to focus on higher-impact work. That shift alone shows a clear uptick in productivity and ROI. As Teer explains, they’re also seeing higher volumes of content being produced now because the team actually has the bandwidth to create and adapt more assets, tailoring them to meet the needs of various channels. So not only is more content being produced, but the quality is improving, too. When the manual work is streamlined, teams are able to reallocate resources and do the things that actually add value. That’s where Stanley Black & Decker is seeing real impact.