Wholesale Growth: How SanMar Scaled Up Content Production with Creative Force
Before and after Creative Force
Discover how SanMar scaled up their content production to meet the growing needs of their business with Creative Force, resulting in higher productivity, greater output, and more cohesive studio processes.
Results at a glance
Established a central hub for all of their image and video data, accessible throughout the entire production process.
About SanMar
SanMar is a wholesale distributor of clothing and accessories with 9 national distribution centers across the United States. The family-owned company has been in business for over 50 years and collaborates with screen printers, embroiderers, athletic dealers, and promotional companies to help customers tell personalized stories through high-quality apparel.
Their product portfolio includes retail brands like Nike and The North Face, industrial brands like Hanes and Jerzees, and their exclusive private label options.
SanMar
Industry: Retail Apparel and Fashion
Location: Issaquah, WA
Company Size: +/- 5,000
Website: https://www.sanmar.com/
Year Founded: 1971
Creative Force has been a game-changer for SanMar. It has empowered us to be more data-driven in how we approach content production, improved our in-house efficiency, and just helped us make better, more informed decisions
Charisse Kennedy
Manager, Studio Operations
Case Story Summary
SanMar was facing a pivotal moment. Their organization was continuing to grow and expand. However, their production studio, which acted as the lifeblood for content both on their website and in their catalogs, was operating on outdated technology hindering their productivity.
By partnering with Creative Force, SanMar brought in a platform that centralized all of their content production, empowered teams to “self-serve” so they could work faster and with more confidence, and provided more transparency into every aspect of content development.
In just their first full year of using Creative Force, SanMar saw an increase in productivity across the board - a 53% increase in in-studio production efficiency and a 63% increase in content throughput - while capturing real metrics around sample management and coordination for the first time.
SanMar is tapping into the platform's potential with its recent expansion into Editorial and is looking forward to building on its initial successes in the years to come.
The Challenge
A lot has changed since SanMar first opened its doors in 1971. A wholesale apparel business built on its partnerships with local Seattle printing businesses, SanMar steadily expanded into sourcing and private-label manufacturing before eventually transforming into one of the United States’ largest retail distributors at the turn of the century.
Their seasonal product catalogs - featuring their latest apparel with high-quality lifestyle and editorial imagery - have become regular fixtures nationwide.
However, as the company grew and expanded, new complications started to bubble to the surface. SanMar was constantly adding new apparel from its retail, private label, and mill partners, which required new pieces of content to accompany them.
While the studio teams did their best to keep up with demand, they quickly found their productivity limited by the systems they had in place.
Excel sheets. One-off documents. Manual processes stretched out over a multitude of different softwares, none of which fully helped them track production and were rarely aligned with how they worked on a day-to-day basis.
If the studio team wanted to scale up content production to meet the growing needs of the business, they knew they needed something better.
The only question was where it would come from and how quickly they could get it up and running.
The Goal:
A Metrics-Driven Platform That Could Help Them Quantify Their Impact
In 2021, Charisse Kennedy was brought in as SanMar’s new Manager of Studio Operations. With over a decade of experience working in the studio environment, Charisse had a clear vision for the future. “We needed to invest in an end-to-end solution,” she says. “Something that would help us with everything from physical sample tracking to flowing shots into retoucher hands. I’ve worked in studios long enough to know how things need to flow. We just needed something to support that.”
Inspired by workflow software she had seen at virtual conferences during COVID-19, and with encouragement from her supervisor, Charisse went to work putting together a proposal for the SanMar executive team.
This involved researching all the solutions available on the market, measuring their capabilities against the organization’s use cases, and clearly articulating the impact it would have on their most pressing KPIs:
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Images Captured (e.g. How much are their on-site teams producing on a day-to-day basis)
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Images Output (e.g. How many captured images are moved through a completed production process and put on-site/in-catalog)
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Samples Processed (e.g. How many physical samples were checked in/out for their on-site teams)
Benchmarking metrics proved to be difficult for Charisse, as SanMar didn’t have visibility into their studio’s sample flow, and their production process was slightly different from the other studios in which she had worked.
Instead of setting daily quotas for in-studio and production teams, SanMar focused on the long-term delivery of content for their Spring and Fall catalogs, along with producing smaller lookbooks throughout the year.
So long as all assets were delivered by the production deadline and ready for these releases, that’s all that mattered.
Using this as inspiration, Charisse was able to go to the executive team with a path forward - more transparency, fewer manual processes, and a way to improve efficiency by delivering to and improving on benchmarks.
She also had a solution in mind: Creative Force.
We knew that Creative Force would be a benefit on a massive marketing team level. It was just a question of how we could get adoption both upstream and downstream.
Nastasya Clark
Senior Project Manager, Marketing Operations & Digital Marketing
Requirements
SanMar had high expectations for their new content production management platform, with three key criteria for success:
Scalability
Increase capacity to scale content production in alignment with the growing demands of the business.
Operational Transparency
Gain comprehensive visibility into every facet of studio operations in order to measure and benchmark performance effectively.
Centralized Data Management
Establish a unified platform that serves as the single source of truth for all content, ensuring consistency and accessibility.
The Launch
After completing a thorough review process, Charisse obtained approval for the initial investment in Creative Force's content production management (CPM) platform in late 2022. Now it was up to her team and Creative Force to ensure they were setting themselves up for success.
Adoption
Nastasya Clark, SanMar’s Senior Project Manager of Marketing Operations & Digital Marketing, had been heavily involved in the scoping process alongside Charisse, with her goal to ensure that Creative Force would be a good fit for the entire organization.
“We knew that Creative Force would be a benefit on a massive marketing team level,” she concluded. “It was just a question of how we could get adoption both upstream and downstream.”
For downstream users (e.g. photographers and retouchers), the answer was empowering them to work more independently. Creative Force offered a single source of truth for their daily tasks, allowing them instant access to up-to-date product information and content without any dependencies.
Filters and Kanban boards enabled them to quickly locate tasks, while advanced search helped them find content across all projects. With auto-naming features also minimizing manual labor, particularly towards the final stages of content production, the end result was a faster and easier way to get work done. Which led, quickly, to widespread adoption.
For the art directors focused on upstream production, they simply needed to know that they would be able to work effectively within a single system.
In making selections, art directors previously had to go through a number of manual and high-touch processes - taking screenshots, adding them to a PDF, marking them up, uploading elsewhere into the system for review, and so on.
Creative Force’s centralized workflow meant that everything was tied together. Selections could be made at any point without losing mark-ups and comments, and they were all tied directly to the assets themselves to ensure no data loss. Like with downstream users, it made their jobs faster and easier, which made adoption a no-brainer.
“Creative Force was such a nicely packaged system that it actually encouraged us to examine many of our own processes and see how we could improve them,” added Nastasya.
Digital Imaging
Matt Varnado and Rolan Wong from SanMar’s digital imaging team both remember life before Creative Force.
“It sucked!” laughs Rolan. “Just from a data perspective, it was hard to see everything.
We had to manually ingest and vet images, see where they were worked on, check if the colorway names were changed during production…it was just really inefficient.”
Rolan specifically notes how something simple like Creative Force’s reuse feature–which allows them to capture colorway settings for one product and pre-populate the same options for another product–fundamentally transformed how the entire team worked.
And he notes that this is just one of many features that have been game-changers for them.
For Matt, who supervises the imaging team, all of this is tied into the team’s ability to more quickly complete marketing project requests. These include their seasonal catalogs, but could also be lookbooks, ad campaigns, and much more.
The complexity of these projects, with each having unique deliverables and requirements, can often make them time and resource-intensive to complete. With Creative Force, however, they have noticed a significant shift.
“To put it in perspective, we completed seven marketing projects in 2022,” says Matt. “In 2023, after we implemented Creative Force, this jumped to 23. For 2024, we’re estimating 30 marketing projects total.”
Operations
Picking the right solution was just the first step for Charisse and the studio operations team. The second step was to establish a formalized data process.
“[Wrangling our data] was our biggest challenge,” says Charisse. “We had to figure out what data points were needed to carry us all the way through the production line and make sure that every single person that interacted with an image or video asset had the data they needed to do their jobs.”
Since SanMar hadn’t had a formal process in the past, Charisse relied heavily on both Creative Force’s industry expertise and her own team’s execution skills to make it happen. And though she admits that they still have room for improvement, they were able to develop their own metadata schema and import it into all of their historical files while simultaneously aligning them to that new structure.
The results have been phenomenal. “Every time I search for anything in Creative Force, it is so fast. I pretty much live in Creative Force now.” The feedback from teams across the studio has been similarly glowing - praising how easily they can get and track images, identify who is touching what, and that it’s all built around them intuitively integrating it into their day-to-day process.
Reporting
With a formal data process and her teams buying in and utilizing the platform, Charisse was ready to focus on the specific KPIs that had served as the impetus for the project. Luckily, she found Creative Force’s robust reporting capabilities quick and easy to use.
“There’s just so much that you can get data on,” she says. “For example, I can log in and pull data on everything we shot for a particular brand years ago. It’s just night and day from what we had before.”
In 2023, SanMar had its first full year using Creative Force. During this year, Charisse was able to measure some significant improvements:
A 53% increase in Images Captured
A 63% increase in Image Output
For the first time ever, Charisse was also able to measure the number of physical samples processed.
The data showed that over 70,000 samples had been processed in 2023, which was both much higher than she expected and far more than her small sample coordination team could handle effectively.
This gave her the ammunition she needed to go to her supervisor and ask for additional help. In both contexts - managing this higher-than-expected workload and making personnel additions based on data - Creative Force was instrumental to her success.
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Customer Experience
SanMar's studio team credits Creative Force's customer success and support teams for playing a vital role in the company's early success with the internal rollout of the platform. The early guidance provided by Creative Force's onboarding and support teams was instrumental in helping SanMar's studio team overcome challenges as they came up and built a robust foundation for success.
“Creative Force’s support team is nice, super helpful, and very responsive. The fact that they are international and available nearly 24-7 has made a huge difference,” says Rolan.
The strong working relationship between the two teams has also been instrumental in ensuring smooth day-to-day operations at SanMar. The support staff at Creative Force helps the studio team promptly address any technical issues and provides immediate assistance with their projects, reducing downtime and increasing productivity.
Charisse added, “Anytime I’ve had an issue or an idea, I can just reach out, and I get very capable hands that come back and catch me. It’s just so wonderful.”
Next Steps
The collaboration between SanMar and Creative Force had already yielded significant productivity gains for SanMar’s studio team in e-commerce PDP content production. However, they quickly recognized that their lifestyle and editorial projects could also benefit from the structure and organization provided by Creative Force.
As a result, SanMar expanded its use of Creative Force to include Editorial Projects at the end of 2023. This allows them to engage in more customized workflows designed to manage the inherent complexity that comes with campaign, editorial, lifestyle, and other marketing and merchandising-driven activities. The team now has more freedom to design flexible pre- and post-production processes, reducing their reliance on templated approaches.
Looking forward, Charisse and her team see the impact that Creative Force will have within the studio environment and beyond. “The photography and videography that comes through my team is at the core of everything our marketing team does,” says Charisse.
The studio's increased productivity has had a positive impact on stakeholders across the organization, from advertising to merchandising. The advertising department has been able to create more effective campaigns while saving time and resources. The merchandising team has been able to enhance their product offerings and bring them to market sooner, resulting in increased sales and customer satisfaction. Charisse expects this impact will continue to grow as they scale up their operations with Creative Force.
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