+A BRANDFOLDER CASE STUDY+

Zeal Optics Powers
Global Asset Distribution
to 3,000+ Retailers
With Brandfolder

Founded in 1997
Based in Boulder, CO

12 employees in thehome office

20 countries andterritories of operation

3,000+ retailpartners worldwide

Ben Peters
President

Mike Lewis  Director of Marketing

Tracey Kennedy  Retail & Office Manager

Zach Riesche  Marketing Specialist+

Zeal Optics is passionate about creating the highest-quality plant-basedeyewear for people who live for outdoor adventure. It’s leading the eyewear
industry in sustainability and social outreach efforts and is guided by three
simple belief pillars: Use less, give back and explore more.

Challenge
Before Brandfolder, the 12-person team at Zeal Optics utilized a variety of unreliable shared
drives that made it difficult to organize, find and share the digital assets their 3,000+
international retail partners needed to do business. Over time their asset sprawl had become
more and more chaotic, developing into a major issue. Some of the key pain points the ZealOptics team experienced include:

Limited functionality sharing large assets with partners
Inefficient sharing of assets with internal and external partners
Repeat updates to crucial pricing documents
Trouble collaborating with global retail partners
Finite capacity for storing thousands of assets
Inconsistent brand usage among partners
Lack of control around usage rights

For example, the lack of a centralized digital asset management (DAM) system led to theirsales teams’ taking content creation into their own hands, which in turn hurt their brand’s
consistency with messaging and imagery.

+Brand consistency and reputation is important to many organizations and is especiallyessential to an organization like Zeal Optics. As a growing business, Zeal needed to berecognized and trusted on an international scale in order to raise awareness for its missionbased eyewear company. After the company was acquired in 2010 by Maui Jim, growth
accelerated and the Zeal team decided it was time to invest in a centralized digital asset
management tool to solidify its brand identity; this led them to Brandfolder.

Solution
After conducting an RFP, the leadership team chose Brandfolder based on its simplicity
and ease of use. Once Brandfolder was implemented at Zeal, it was a relief for their
12-person team, who could now distribute assets easily and efficiently to their sales
reps and 3,000+ (and growing!) global retail partners.

“Brandfolder has made us a lot
more efficient in our work. We
are a global company, so by
having our marketing assets on
Brandfolder, we can share theminternationally very quickly.”–Ben Peters, President, Zeal Optics

Brandfolder’s ease of use and user-friendly UI has made it
possible for its internal sales team and external distributors toadopt the new tool. Every month, they include a shared linkto their assets as well as a Brandfolder Portal to access newsales tools. They also conduct annual sales training sessions
for new employees. “I know Brandfolder is working well for us
because I receive fewer emailed requests and see more people
downloading the assets from our share links,” Zach Riesche,marketing specialist, explains. With Brand Intelligence, theirteam can look into the analytics and learn which assets are
the most popular and where there are gaps in their marketing
materials. Even expanding into new countries where there is alanguage barrier has been easy because of how visual the userinterface of Brandfolder is for its partners and distributors tounderstand where to go to find the assets they need.

“It’s insane how many assets like sales
collateral we have to send out to ourglobal customers several times a year.
I can’t imagine not having Brandfolder.”–Zach Riesche, Marketing Specialist

Overall, Zeal’s process has become more streamlined and optimized, with a single source of truththat houses all of its digital assets, allowing its team to save hundreds of hours per year. Becauseof all this free time on its hands, Zeal Optics has been empowered to stay true to its brand pillars.
How does Zeal use less, give back and explore more with Brandfolder?

It can give back fromthe money it’s saved fromprinting costs

The team at Zeal is enabled
to explore more in the great
outdoors as well as develop
more innovative products
from all the time they’ve
saved with Brandfolder+It’s able to use less paper byhaving digital versions of its
prospecting and sales enablement
tools (think product catalogs,trifolds & one-sheeters)

“Exploring more means pushing
exploration boundaries in the outdoors
and internally developing better
products and processes as well as
reducing our footprint. Having moretime to focus on those things not only
helps us to have more work-life balance,
but it also lets us focus on strategic
aspects of the business versus justchurning out document requests.”–Mike Lewis, Director of Marketing+

With Brandfolder, Zeal will be expanding into new
global territories offering localized sales tools for its
specific region and language and will continue toorganize, share and distribute assets easily and quickly.

•hello@brandfolder.com+

Visit us at brandfolder.com