Trek Gears Up With Cloudinary’s AI-Powered, API-First DAM

500K assets

powered through Cloudinary’s DAM

Major migration in weeks

replacing previous system across entire company

Future-proof workflows

to handle animations, videos, and other rich media

ABOUT

An American Omnichannel Success Story

From its roots in a small Wisconsin barn in 1976, privately held Trek Bicycle has become one of the world’s favorite and most trusted bicycle manufacturers and distributors by honoring its founding principles while continuing to innovate. Trek’s unique omnichannel model, works with retail partners at key points in the customer journey, delivering seamless, personalized service to both seasoned riders and newcomers — whether they order online or shop in-store. The move from its previous system to Cloudinary’s modern DAM opens up a whole new menu of capabilities. These allow Trek to deliver unique visual experiences along the entire customer journey.

Industry Retail and Consumer Goods

Headquarters Waterloo, Wisconsin, United States

Employees 5,449 employees

“Even though we had terabytes of 20 years of assets we needed to move, migration was relatively painless. The Cloudinary documentation was a breeze to follow, and our list of URLs just migrated over, grabbed the raw assets and put them where they needed to be. From there, the delivery to the web was very straightforward.”

—Dave Gorski, User Interface Manager, Trek Bicycle

THE CHALLENGE

Terabytes of Trail Biking Legacy

Trek needed to replace its existing digital image solution and its old DAM for a number of reasons. It needed better reporting and analytics on asset usage and performance. Crucially, it needed to be able to present its ultra-detailed “photorealistic” product photography online, but in a much more efficient and automated way. As Dave Gorski, Trek’s User Interface Manager, explains, “The way we deliver assets on the web really has to be very formulaic.”

Gorski also sought a future-proofed route forward, where managing components that render animations, videos, and other rich media formats would continue to be easy, without sacrificing performance or aesthetics. But he also had an eye on the past: over 20 years and to service its loyal customer base Trek had built up — and needed to make available — a rich heritage of images, from early models to stores to a wide range of modifications and options.

Gorski says, “We had to make sure Cloudinary could do everything we were doing with our previous system; we didn’t have the bandwidth to rewrite or reconfigure how all of that previous functionality worked. So, we needed as straightforward a transition as possible.”

Trek’s Director of Digital Services, Beth Schoob, elaborates further: “This 20-year-old asset trove needed to be organized and archived, but sensitively — which would need a sophisticated, flexible DAM. For example, no changes could interfere with the firm’s ability to support customers with lifetime warranties of older bikes, which might depend on sunsetted bike families.”

“Trek frames have a lifetime warranty — we produce products that are built to last people for a really long time! Eventually customers will need to work on their Trek and know what types of parts or specifications that originally came on their bike. So we do still serve images of products that we haven’t sold for decades on our website; we need to keep those images so that the experience is still good on trekbikes.com.”

—Beth Schoob, Director of Digital Services, Trek Bicycle

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

Big Migration, Little Hassle

Trek selected Cloudinary for its automation and AI that makes it easy and efficient to deliver images, animations, videos, and other rich media content on its website and digital channels — today and in the future.

A top consideration, however, was Cloudinary’s composability and API-first architecture that’s highly scalable and integrates well with other Trek tools and workflows. During the migration to Cloudinary’s DAM, there could be no interruptions as the old DAM was transitioned off. This was crucial because, as Gorski says, “There are other channels besides our website that take advantage of these assets; we didn’t have a clear picture of who was referencing what, somewhere in some archive, for example.”

Cloudinary made this transition very straightforward in just a few weeks. Gorski comments, “Even though we had terabytes of 20 years of assets we needed to move, migration was relatively painless. The Cloudinary documentation was a breeze to follow, and our list of URLs just migrated over, grabbed the raw assets and put them where they needed to be. From there, the delivery to the web was very straightforward.”

Both Gorski and Schoob praise the support they received from their Cloudinary customer success manager (CSM), “As we learned a new way of working with URLs, there was a small learning curve in the beginning. However, our CSM was excellent and really helped guide us through the migration process, directing our questions to the right resources.”

“We knew the implementation of our older system was a little outdated and we were looking to upgrade what we could deliver on the web. For us, the ability to deliver static assets, animations, video, and 3D all from a single source, and knowing that Cloudinary could do it, was one of the driving factors behind our choice.”

—Dave Gorski, User Interface Manager, Trek Bicycle

THE RESULTS

Top of the Digital Asset Mountain

All digital assets are now accessed from Cloudinary as a single source of truth for visual media that enables easy omnichannel delivery. This includes kiosks in Trek stores to apps and trekbikes.com.

Thanks to new automated workflows for marketing and content teams, Trek’s developers are able to be “hands off” and focus on more critical priorities. For example, Trek is now actively exploring new services, like a new online, visually driven bike configurator tool that uses image layering to provide an authentic but product-accurate design and customization experience.

On that score, Trek is excited about the potential to leverage Cloudinary’s support for 3D renderings. It also plans to transition short video hosting from YouTube to Cloudinary. Not only will that improve CX, but it will also reduce its dependency on JavaScript.

Trek is now also benefiting from better asset performance. Gorski confirms, “We’re definitely seeing faster page load times. We’re seeing this in SEO metrics like LCP [Google’s Core Web Vital metric: Largest Contentful Paint], which are improving.”

Cloudinary has helped position this beloved and trusted global brand at the top of the mountain by providing the tools and support needed to adapt and expand its digital asset strategy today and also prepare it for the future.

“We started using Cloudinary to meet a very specific need and later expanded to DAM and workflow capabilities. In the near term, we’re eager to try AI tagging capabilities we’ve tested. There’s so much promise here to modernize our internal processes and workflows, and ultimately improve the way we do business.”