Introduction
Dyla Brands is changing the world through better hydration and nutrition. Their better-for-you beverage company is enjoyed in over 10% of U.S households (which equates to about 20 million people!) each year. Here’s Dyla Brands in numbers:
Dyla Brands owns Stur, the #1 natural water enhancer, and partners with established brand innovators to further disrupt the $5 billion drink mix and flavored water markets. Their drink mix brands include Dole, Ocean Spray, Liquid Death, C4, PeakH2O, Crush, Hawaiian Punch, Snapple, A&W, 7Up, and Canada Dry. Dyla Brands also owns Happy Viking, a plant protein & superfood company created by Venus Williams, and sponsored by all-star athletes like Megan Rapinoe and Michelle Wie West.
Emma Madia, Senior Design Manager, started her career at Dyla right out of college and has now proudly been with the brand for nearly 7 years. When she first joined, Dyla Brands was a tiny startup. Today, Dyla Brands has become a recognized name in their category. Emma said, “I’ve watched the company scale itself and most of the team, who have been here for years, scale themselves, so it’s been a good journey.”
By using Playbook for the last several years, Dyla Brands has:
Critical Challenges Before Adopting Playbook
The creative team is responsible for everything from designing packaging labels for new innovations to tradeshows and providing updated visuals for website branding. For a fast-moving brand like Dyla Brands where the creative team tends to wear several hats like Emma does, a constant flow of creative assets is critical.
But, unfortunately, before Playbook, managing those assets was anything but easy. Emma remembers the struggle all too well.
The team relied on internal storage systems, like Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive, which while great for document and presentation storage, were not up to speed to handle the mass amount of digital assets they were acquiring. These platforms also made it difficult for their sales team and external vendors to navigate.
“Everyone had their own file sorting systems on their own computers and so nothing was organized, no one knew who had what and everything was just kind of everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It was a huge headache.”
The consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry usually has creative and sales teams who work quite closely together. Often, a sales team member will need an image of, for example, a strawberry watermelon-flavoured Stur product image. They’ll need it in certain dimensions and typically, right away, to meet a fast-approaching deadline.
Many times, the sales team struggled to find the right product image asset because of inconsistent naming conventions and a lack of visual reference points. In addition to that, even if they did find it, the asset likely wasn’t in the specifications needed for the request at hand.
So Emma would need to either quickly resend the asset in the right aspect ratio, or create something off the cuff very quickly. Either way, it was not an efficient use of time for anyone that kept recurring.
Why Did Dyla Brands Choose Playbook?
One of Dyla’s recent partner campaigns was with another happy Playbook customer we recently interviewed, BlendJet. The teams created a custom BlendJet blender in collaboration with BlendJet, Happy Viking and Venus Williams. They actually used Playbook and were a big reason why Dyla dove into Playbook. Emma said, “They shared this Playbook link with us and we’re like, what is this magic? It’s so easy!”
The biggest criteria Emma and her team had when choosing a DAM solution was accessibility. The ability to share creative assets externally was crucial due to the high volume of sharing they do on a daily basis. Dyla Brands shares bulk assets with a lot of external partners; whether it’s with the sales team, nationwide retailers, or advertising media outlets. There was no longer room for roadblocks like having access denied or not knowing where to look.
In addition to that, an important part of the decision-making process was being able to choose a digital asset management tool that could grow with them. They didn’t want to run into a situation where they would realize they ran out of storage, and then to get more storage they would need to triple their costs or reassess other platforms. They were looking for something they could just commit to for the long term.
Dyla Brands has their Playbook sorted into different categories like drink mixes, Happy Viking, and Stur. Access control was another thing on Dyla’s wishlist when looking for a DAM platform – they didn’t want certain teams within the company or external partners to have full edit control of their entire Playbook. However, certain teams, such as their sales team, still need access so they can create sales decks, find product imagery, and export in specific dimensions for requests like online grocery listings or digital promotions.
For the Playbook creative team, flexible access control has been great as it’s allowed them to control their assets and whether other teams can or can’t move, rearrange, or add assets.
Playbook isn’t a one-size-fits-all sort of platform, it really can be organized in whatever way would be most beneficial for your team’s needs. For instance, when Emma is working with external agencies, she’s able to grant them access to only the 3 folders that would be most relevant to them.
The marketing team has all of the control, but other teams still have what they need to export or download the assets for retail-specific contacts.
The impact: Results achieved
Playbook has been a key advantage when it comes to any sort of onboarding situation with an external agency. One example is when the Dyla Brands team was onboarding their email agency team for Happy Viking and then again for Stir six months later.
Before Dyla Brands used Playbook, whenever Emma was onboarding a new agency, she would have to manually gather up all the brand guidelines, design files, and everything that was core to the brand. After manually self-curating all of the core brand assets, she would have to share a WeTransfer file. That alone equals hours of time savings because all she has to do is go to the specific folders and grant access to the email addresses that need it.
Another example of the impact Playbook has had on Dyla Brand’s workflow would be going back to the BlendJet campaign we spoke about earlier. Emma’s team had a lot of images that needed to be edited and approved by several different stakeholders. Those types of files are enormous, so trying to gather them in a cohesive way without losing quality due to compression was always a struggle.
Being able to upload all the raw footage into Playbook saved, again, hours of time. They organized everything very clearly, where they had subboards saying raw footage, unedited, approved lifestyle images, and Venus-approved images. It was very easy to navigate and download from BlendJet, Dyla Brands, or Venus’ side versus having it on an external hard drive or on a sole computer hard drive.
We’ve all been there: stuck in a platform and not understanding what we’re doing wrong. A huge benefit that Emma appreciates is the accessibility to the Playbook team versus going through an archaic customer service portal. “I feel like I’m connecting with a human, I know who it is - Daniel’s great.”
Emma says, “For me specifically - and I feel like I can speak for my sales team who are not in creative fields as well - having a visual presence goes a really long way versus just having folders with standard naming conventions.. Being able to visually see and scroll through everything you have to work with or choose from. I think it goes above and beyond in terms of helping to manage all that you might be managing.”
Playbook makes it much easier to understand your creative assets by just looking at them rather than needing to go into each folder and a million different subfolders to find the correct specs. And if an asset isn’t in Playbook already, it’s incredibly easy for her to drag the asset in.
There’s also more flexibility from an exporting standpoint. For example, when Walmart needs an image in a certain size for their online grocery PDP page, the team can directly change the specs for that image and export it without ever leaving Playbook. Again, it is a massive time saver.
Control is huge for Dyla Brands. Having that control to flex Playbook how they want it to work has been transformative. It isn’t a one-size-fits-all sort of platform, it really can be organized in whatever way would be most beneficial for your team’s needs. For instance, when Emma is working with external agencies, she’s able to grant them access to only the 3 folders that would be most relevant to them.
Looking ahead: The future with Playbook
Emma sees Playbook continuing to grow with the team as they manage and scale their internal product image assets with the sales team. Dyla Brands is diving into a lot of innovation in the next year for Stur and Happy Viking. One of their goals for 2025 is to produce a new flavor every two weeks. Emma said, “I think for innovation and renovation specifically, it’s going to continue to be a very, very useful tool.”
On a personal note, Emma believes so strongly in Playbook that she’s even recommended it to her mom and another family friend who was looking for jobs at the time. “I’m like, OK, I have this hidden trick. It’s this thing called Playbook.”
The job market is incredibly competitive and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get a hiring manager’s attention. Thus, Emma has been advising friends to build a portfolio using one of Playbook’s easy, yet highly visual publish templates.
It offers a leg up by allowing you to have some sort of visual component to your job application, even if you’re not in the creative space. Emma’s mom and she put together a whole Playbook for her, including her resume, different writing pieces and magazines she has contributed to. In the end, she got the job!
Her best advice for other growing teams (and anyone on the hunt in the job market!) is to choose a DAM platform that works best for your team. At Playbook, we have so much respect for small creative teams who manage to juggle large volumes of files like Dyla Brands does.
Wearing many hats means that every second counts in your workflow, and saving hours of admin time looking for creative assets can be a game changer. Ask yourself and your team, is your workflow as streamlined as it could be?
Book a Teams demo and see Playbook in action today.