Mountain Equipment ditched Dropbox to manage 900+ retailers

Challenge: 95% of Mountain Equipment’s revenue comes from retail partners. But without a proper system to manage and share assets, supporting them was becoming increasingly difficult. Retailers often didn’t get the content they needed on time, and valuable assets were going unused. The team risked delivering a poor experience—which, in a competitive industry, could have meant losing out to the competition.

Solution: Dash gave Mountain Equipment a central, easy-to-use platform to organise and share content. The team now creates curated collections and custom retailer portals, ensuring partners always have the latest assets. As Terry, the brand’s Head of Marketing told us: “Dash is a hill I’d be willing to die on.” Keep reading to find out why. 

About Mountain Equipment 

Mountain Equipment was founded in 1961 and is one of the longest-running outdoor brands in the world. They make some of the finest mountaineering gear, all with one goal in mind: to protect people and keep them comfortable in the mountains. 🏔️

With all their years in the industry, it’s no surprise Mountain Equipment has built up a huge library of visual assets. From an archive of photography featuring iconic climbs, to the 1,200 products on their website at any one time—there’s a lot to juggle.

That’s why they needed Dash. 🥰

The challenge 

It was impossible to manage their 1200+ product library 

Mountain Equipment’s marketing team deals with an enormous volume of product content. As Terry, their Head of Marketing told us: 

“We have around 900 to 1,200 products available on our website at any one time. Every product has more than one image attached to it, and each one has multiple colourways. That means we’ve got around 2,000 to 3,000 images coming through from photoshoots that we have to sort through, consolidate, and decide which ones we actually want to use.”

Before Dash, they were using a combination of Dropbox and internal servers to manage everything. But as the library kept growing, so did the chaos. It became harder to find images, and harder to ensure everyone—internal teams and external partners—had access to the right content when they needed it.

Quality content wasn’t being used 

Mountain Equipment has never been short on brilliant content. Their team regularly creates videos, ads, and product photography to showcase their gear. But there was a big problem: that content wasn’t always getting used.

“We have all this amazing content. But the barrier has always been that those assets would sit on someone’s computer for weeks or even months—and never see the light of day.”

Despite the time, budget, and creative energy poured into production, distribution was falling short. Without a reliable way to organise and share content, even the best material risked going unseen and unused.

“You can put all the money in the world into the best shoots, but if you don’t share the content, it’s pointless.”

Keeping retail relationships strong (and revenue flowing)

Although Mountain Equipment has built up an impressive direct-to-consumer catalogue, their primary source of revenue still comes from retail partners. A quick look at their store locator shows just how extensive that network is, with 973 retailers stocking their gear around the world.

That’s a lot of partners to support—and each one needs easy access to product imagery, campaign assets, logos and brand guidelines. Without a proper system in place, managing those requests was becoming overwhelming.

“We were sending out WeTransfer links with assets to really important key customers—and they just weren’t getting there,” says Terry. “Or, once they were finally let through a filter by that company to the right member of staff, the links had expired. Then you had to go back and do it all again.”

And in a competitive market, that kind of service matters. Mountain Equipment has built a reputation as a trusted, reliable brand. But today, staying ahead isn’t just about making great products—it’s also about delivering an exceptional experience to retailers.

“If we do a terrible job, our competitors will do it better. And that’s where the trouble starts. We’re seen as one of the better brands in the market—but that reputation has to go beyond the product. It has to extend to the service level that comes afterwards as well.”

They needed a tool that was fast, reliable, and built to support their most important relationships. 

Bottlenecks were slowing down campaign launches 

If that wasn’t enough, it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the day-to-day running of campaigns—especially when the one team member who knew where all the assets were happened to be away. Terry says he remembers one particular campaign when his colleague was on holiday. 

“A couple of months after I joined, a colleague who normally looked after all the assets went on holiday for two weeks. During that time, I desperately needed a couple of important images for an ad campaign—and I just couldn’t find them. I ended up spending the best part of three days trawling through hundreds of files trying to find one image.”

Does this pain sound familiar? 😅 Well, luckily Terry found Dash that provided the solution to all his problems. ✨

The solution 

Finding a DAM that gets the job done 

After 20 years in the industry, Terry had spent plenty of time looking at DAM solutions—but nothing ever stuck. Most digital asset management solutions were built for enterprise use, packed with unnecessary features and hefty price tags.

“They always came with more bells and whistles than we’d ever use. All these things sound great on paper, but when it gets down to the reality of working as a marketing team, we just needed something that was intuitive and effective.”

That’s when he found Dash.

“I couldn’t believe it. It felt like all my dreams had come true. After 20 years of searching, Dash finally gave us a way to move beyond the chaos of folders on Dropbox and WeTransfer. It’s become an essential tool for our marketing team.”

Treating retail partners like VIPs 

95% of Mountain Equipment’s revenue comes from selling stock to distributors, retail shops, and wholesalers across the globe. So it’s absolutely essential that the team provides those partners with the right assets to help them sell Mountain Equipment products.

With Dash, they can easily gather all that content and get it to the right retailers—fast.

Here’s how they do it:

• Curated collections: The team can pull together specific sets of assets and share them with partners via a simple link (with or without an expiry date).
  
  
• Retailer portals: They can also create portals tailored to different retailers. This gives partners access to a public-facing version of Dash, where they can search using keywords and tags, and download assets in the sizes they need.

As Terry puts it:

“Sharing campaign assets with our retail partners has never been easier. We can cherry-pick the right images and products for them, ensuring they have access to everything they need in their own custom portal. It’s just brilliant. It shows them we care about more than just selling jackets—it shows we care about the level of service that comes afterwards.”

A live asset library that powers product launches

Mountain Equipment runs two major seasonal drops each year: Spring/Summer in February and Autumn/Winter in August. As new products arrive in the warehouse, the marketing team needs to move fast. They’ve got to update campaign assets, refresh their website, and make sure retailers have everything they need to promote the new collections.

It’s also made a big difference to how quickly products go live on their website. Thanks to Dash’s Shopify integration, the ecommerce team can link assets directly from Dash—no downloading, re-uploading, or version mix-ups.

“Shopify has literally improved our speed of getting products live on the website no end—because we’re not having to re-upload anything. It’s a direct, peer-to-peer setup, and it’s been great.”

Saving money on content creations

When you’ve been in business for over 60 years, it’s easy to fall into the rhythm of “we’ve always done it this way.” For Mountain Equipment, one of those long-standing habits was filming their seasonal sales launches. This included a full camera setup, editing, packaging the content, and making it available to internal teams and wholesale partners across the world.

Everyone said they needed it. So the team kept producing it every six months.

But once they started sharing the content via Dash, they had access to something they’d never had before: data. 

In Dash, the team is able to view the usage data of each asset. 

After two consecutive seasons with zero downloads, it became clear that nobody was actually using the video content. Having that insight gave the team the confidence to stop producing it altogether.

“It was so vindicating. We always had a feeling it wasn’t being watched, but Dash gave us the data to prove it. We took that to senior management and said: here’s the evidence, and they agreed—we didn’t need to carry on. That was the end of it.”

This means they’ve been able to save time, energy and budget on something that nobody was watching.

Keeping shoots organised, on-brand and compliant 

Mountain Equipment creates a huge amount of content each season. With 900–1,200 products live at any time—and multiple expeditions happening throughout the year—they regularly send models, team members, and photographers into the wild to capture products in action.

That means staying on top of image usage rights and keeping everything organised is essential. With Dash, they can do exactly that.

“We usually come back from trips with around 4,000 images and cherry-pick the best 50. We upload them to Dash and tag everything—what expedition it’s from, who shot it, any usage rights, and even visible products. And we can apply those tags across all assets in one go. It saves us hours and hours.”

This workflow not only makes it easier to manage content, it ensures the team can:

• Maintain brand consistency across campaigns
  
  
• Honour photographer agreements and licensing restrictions
  
  
• Be confident that only approved, on-brand images are shared with partners

It’s a simple, efficient system that keeps their asset library compliant and ready to use.

Keeping track of multiple versions 

With each new season, Mountain Equipment sees around 30–40% of their product range updated. That could mean new items, discontinued lines or subtle design tweaks. And with so many updates happening so often, they need a way to keep track of every version of every image.

That’s where Dash’s versioning feature comes in.

Instead of manually replacing images across multiple folders and collections, the team can simply upload the new version of an asset into the same spot in Dash. It’s then automatically updated everywhere it appears.

“Say we’ve got a shot of a red jacket, but in the following season the panel gets changed to black—nothing else changes. We just upload the new variant into the same position. Wherever that product appears, it’s instantly updated.”

This saves hours of time and ensures total consistency across campaigns, retail partner content and internal teams.

Better day-to-day efficiency 

With Dash, the team can finally make the most of the content they work so hard to create. That’s because they’re able to tag assets in a way that makes it really easy for the marketing team to find and get on with their job. 

“That’s been the biggest change—we’re sharing things quicker than we’ve ever done before. We know the assets are getting where they need to be, and that’s improving our marketing activity and awareness.”

It also means they’re able to deliver an experience to both internal and external teams that reflects who they are as a brand. 

“Finally, it feels like this part of what we do is aligned with the quality of the product that we make. We’re adding a level of value we’ve never been able to deliver before—and Dash has been the enabler that’s made that possible.”

Plus, it’s allowed Terry to step back and take a breath. 🧘

“My headaches are much less than they were before, let’s put it that way. Whenever I need something, I know I can go to Dash.”

Terry’s recommendation to other brands

Finally, we asked for Terry’s final thoughts on Dash (and whether he would recommend it to other brands). 🥰

“Dash is a hill I’d be willing to die on. If someone told me we had to give it up, there’d probably be a few eruptions—I just don’t see how we could ever go back to anything else.

I’m doing my best to push it into some of the other companies in our group. We’re always showing them how it works, making them jealous—and they are jealous, because most of them are still stuck using Dropbox.

But we’re getting there. I think we’ll win them over eventually.” 🙌

If you’re like Terry and have been searching for the ideal creative content management solution, you don’t need to look any further. Stop putting up with Dropbox and try Dash free for 14-days to start making better use of your content.