Pics.io Customer Stories: Hudson Valley Seed Company
Organization’s name: Hudson Valley Seed Company
Headquarters: Accord, NY
Founded: 2008
Hudson Valley Seed Company, based in the picturesque Hudson Valley region, is a licensed organic seed company. They offer an extensive catalog of seeds including vegetables, flowers, herbs, and more. Beyond seeds, they also provide garden-themed art and tools to enhance the gardening experience.
Today we talked to Douglas Muller, one of the company’s co-owners, about their experience with Pics.io digital asset management.
- Douglas, can you tell me more about your organization?
We're a relatively small seed company. We sell seeds, dahlia tubers, seed garlic, seed potatoes, tools, art, etc. - all for home gardeners primarily and small-scale farmers. Primarily we sell in the United States and Canada.
"I really liked that Pics.io works on top of Google Drive and that felt like the kind of thing we were looking for. We're happy with it and we use it a lot."
- What are your responsibilities?
I'm one of the owners and at the moment I am holding the marketing responsibilities. I've been using Pics.io quite a bit recently because I've been more hands-on with marketing stuff.
- What was the main problem before you adopted DAM?
This is our 15th year in business and we've accumulated tons of photographs and other digital content from those years. We had no organizational system at all before, so the digital asset management software was a big improvement to go from nothing to something very substantial and robust.
One of the problems was that anytime we needed images for marketing or the catalog, we were struggling to locate them. And we couldn’t have multiple people on the team to collaborate on images at once.
I really liked that Pics.io works on top of Google Drive and that felt like the kind of thing we were looking for. We're happy with it and we use it a lot.
- What does your current workflow look like with Pics.io?
We have between 3 and 5 internal employees who are collecting content, especially during the growing season. They're doing photography in the field of vegetable and flower varieties and creating videos as well. They collect the content, upload it to Pics.io, and tag it using custom metadata fields. Then marketers can quickly find recently uploaded photos and use them. Also, our product team works with DAM for our catalog - they add photos and videos to our e-commerce website to our product list.
Primarily we use DAM for gathering, organizing, and accessing images and videos. We do sometimes also use photo editing tools that are embedded in Pics.io. We also developed our metadata scheme with all the custom tags.
- What are the advantages of DAM for you?
Our previous way of doing things was not very cohesive among all the team members. Having one very specific application like Pics.io digital asset management that matches what we needed to see happen is very helpful.
"Every time we need an image, we can find it immediately. In total, Pics.io DAM saves us at least a few hours per month. "
Before that, we were trying various things like Google Drive, for example, and none of it was doing what we needed it to. In particular, with all the tagging. For instance, we have around 60 tomato varieties in our catalog. With AI tagging in Google Photos, if you type in “tomato”, you can see all of these varieties - this tool will correctly capture all the tomatoes. But we also have all these additional layers of information like variety name, height, etc., which a human has to put in. So we needed something that works with uniquely customized tagging and Pics.io DAM helped a lot with its full tagging functionality and tools for sharing among different people. For instance, we can easily create a list of tomato sorts, assign them to pictures, and tailor our search to perform as we require it.
- Maybe you can estimate how much time the DAM system saves you?
Every time we need an image, we can find it immediately. Just yesterday I did it with someone else on the team and it was like: “Found that, found that, found that, found that.” I could find all the images they needed very fast because of the tagging and organizational system. In total, Pics.io DAM saves us at least a few hours per month.
- Do you have a favorite feature in Pics.io?
I do like the editor and having it right there and being able to use it so quickly. I don't have to export material anywhere or use Photoshop or Canvas on my desktop. I just get the thing done right there. And then I can download the improved version immediately.
- How you’re using all the materials stored in Pics.io?
It's primarily digital now - our website, social media, and printed materials for our in-house packaging.
- Thank you so much for the interview!
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