Case Study: Fireclay TileUsing for Product Photos

Featuring Gina, a Photographer at Fireclay Tile

About Fireclay Tile➢

“Make beautiful tile for people the way they want it, when they want it”

➢ Founded in 1986

➢ Hand make 100% of products in Northern California factory

➢ Customer focused, invested in making sure customers receive personal attention for each and every project with seamless communication throughout the entire process

Meet Gina, in-house photographer

I’m in charge of generating product photos, working with the creative marketing team to create our

emails and other promotional photos, and image database organization. I also reach out to outside

photographers and customers on an ongoing basis to add images to our database for blog & social

content. “

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Types of Fireclay Tile Images

➢ Customer installation photos

➢ Product photos

➢ Still lifes

➢ Promotional images“We produce and catalog hundreds of images each month.”

How Fireclay Tile uses images➢ Inspire customers on their interior design projects.

➢ Show a wide range of products.

➢ Share customer installation images as reference for future clients.

“With over a hundred glazes and 30 sizes in our Tile line alone, there are thousands of combinations we need to

represent through imagery.”

Challenges before Smartimage

Our catalog was large and unorganized. Before we could even begin to think about moving our images into a digital asset management system, we had to get a handle

on the photos that we had. “

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Challenges before Smartimage

A large portion of my time daily would be taken up by requests for photos, as team members needed them

to share with customers. ““

Challenges before Smartimage

We typically had images on separate computers, making it difficult to know which images were where.

If a salesperson needed a specific image, often they would have to ask several team members before finding it. Images

were then sent through email before eventually making it to the customer. “

“

Looking for a solution

We needed something affordable and easy to use. We did the research and found that many DAM systems

were out of our price range and difficult to set up and manage. “

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Must have features

Searchability was the most important feature we needed. “

Easy viewing by being able to scroll through and preview a large number of images. “

Access for team members to search and grab the images themselves without the bottleneck of a single computer. “

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What lead you to trying out Smartimage?

Our company reached a point where we desperately needed an image database system. We began by

using the Smartimage free trial. ““

Favorite Smartimage Features

Tagging, fast search, and big thumbnails for previewing. All three features combined allow for users to work quickly and efficiently, thus increasing productivity. No longer do we need to waste time searching, downloading, and clicking through multiple pages to find exactly the image we need.“

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Your results with Smartimage

Now, images are easily accessible and searchable from anywhere, which was always our main issue with our large image catalog. “

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We’re able to better serve our customers by quickly showing beautiful product images and installations for inspiration while crafting their kitchen backsplash, bathroom, or other tile installation.”

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Why Smartimage?

It’s the perfect price point for our small business, and is very easy to setup and manage, especially if you do the legwork (image tagging and organization) first.“

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Learn more atSmartimage.com

Installation photo credit Malcolm Fearon Photography