Introduction
BlendJet is an eCommerce brand that offers portable blenders and smoothie ingredients, driven by a mission to make healthy living more convenient. The company is tackling the challenge that convenient food often isn't healthy, while healthy food is rarely convenient. BlendJet offers portable, battery-powered blenders for making anything from smoothies and protein shakes, to mixed drinks and baby food.
In today’s world where social media is a dominant part of daily life, consistently creating engaging content is crucial to standing out and driving eCommerce success. That’s why for Blendjet, finding a platform to help streamline content creation and collaboration was a priority in 2024.
Creative content is incredibly important for BlendJet’s success. According to Zoe Patchin, Digital Marketing Manager at BlendJet, a large portion of their revenue comes from social media and TV ads. BlendJet is Playbook’s biggest user from a storage perspective, with 17Tb of files safely stored. Together, Playbook and Blendjet:
The challenge: Managing creative complexity
The BlendJet creative team is small but mighty, so understanding how to collaborate effectively is a skill they’ve had to sharpen. Whether it’s internally or with external partners, collaboration is the key to getting anything done. BlendJet used to keep their 17Tb of creative assets (a huge amount of files that Playbook helps share securely!) on Google Drive. The problem with that? Their team couldn’t find anything.
This may sound like a small issue, but the minutes spent looking for a particular creative asset can really add up. Our State of Creative Digital Asset Management Report 2024 found that 33% of creative professionals spend more than one hour per week searching for files before they switch to Playbook. That is one hour per week that could’ve been better spent creating beautiful on-brand designs, scroll-stopping videos, or impactful illustrations.
Zoe spearheaded the content creator initiative for BlendJet, and found that Google Drive was not making her job easier. In fact, it did quite the opposite. When creators emailed their content submissions, she often forgot to upload them to the appropriate Google Drive folder right away. This led to the frustrating task of sifting through old emails weeks later to find missed video files. Does this sound like you and your team? Book a demo here.
Using Google Drive for task management became incredibly tedious. In marketing, where finding assets is a core responsibility, the process needs to be seamless for everyone involved. When it’s not, something as straightforward as posting to social media can take a week to complete.
Collaboration became a challenge too—asking colleagues for help locating creative assets often caused delays, as they might be in meetings, busy, or unavailable until the next day. This slow, disjointed approach only made everything more frustrating and time-consuming
The solution: Why Playbook?
When Zoe’s manager introduced Playbook to her she said, “Zoe, we may finally have a solution to our Google Drive issues.” The idea of this was super exciting for Zoe. Their team was at a point where they knew that something needed to change because everything was taking too long to execute.
With so many creative assets stored in Google Drive, Zoe was understandably hesitant about migrating everything to Playbook. Thankfully, their customer support wizard, Alex, seamlessly transferred all their files. It was a huge help because knowing where to start can feel impossible with so many important files on the line.
Zoe manages all of BlendJet’s organic social media and has seen huge improvements when trying to find the right file in a sea of assets. When she needs to highlight a specific colorway of BlendJet blenders — like showcasing pink and red models for an upcoming Valentine’s Day post — AI search and auto image tagging quickly bring those items to the top of the search.
This is a much quicker solution than what she had to do in the past: sift through a photographer’s entire photo session, search the videographer’s Google Drive folders and search through the content she’s already created. With so much content floating around internally at BlendJet, whether created by the team or provided by external partners, it’s a relief for Zoe to have everything in one place. It’s made content creation much more streamlined and efficient.
Another feature Zoe raves about is the ability to leave comments at certain points in a video. For example, if she wants the creator to edit a section six seconds in, she can pause the video and leave a comment at that exact moment. This eliminates the back-and-forth emails that often arise after content is submitted and ensures the creator knows exactly what needs to be changed.
All feedback is shared directly in Playbook, where the creator can respond on the same board. The in-app chat feature also allows them to iron out any other details before the content goes live.
When working on social media posts that don’t involve other creators, Playbook continues to streamline Zoe’s process. She can upload all the images for a carousel to a board, add notes, and type the caption — all within Playbook. This is far more efficient than keeping images and captions separate in a Google Doc, where they could easily get lost or misplaced.
The impact: Results achieved
Zoe isn’t the only one on the team that has been reaping the benefits of switching to Playbook. Everyone across the marketing, creative, and even leadership teams is now actively using it. Ryan Pamplin, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at BlendJet said,
“I didn't think we needed Playbook at first, given we were already using Google Drive — but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Playbook has revolutionized the way we manage and maximize our digital assets.
With AI-generated metadata and labelling, finding specific files — like photos of Mint BlendJet 2s — is effortless and incredibly fast. Sharing curated libraries with partners is smooth and intuitive, allowing us to extract far more value from our assets than ever before. It’s a joy to use, saves us time, and has made our team more efficient and effective.”
The teams’ workflows have been significantly improved, even if they still use Google Drive for some assets. For BlendJet, Dropbox and Google Drive syncing within Playbook makes it easy to work with creators who may already have a certain way of working. For example, they have one creator in particular who puts all her videos into a Dropbox folder. With Playbook’s syncing feature, assets will originally be uploaded into Dropbox, and then will get synced into Playbook.
Playbook has made collaborating with influencers significantly easier. When Zoe onboards a new creator, she immediately makes a folder with their name on it. The creator is added as a collaborator and the folder is only for the content they produce. The creator can then manage that folder by dragging and dropping their content into the folder. Once the content is uploaded, it can be shared with anyone on the team or even teams outside of BlendJet — all with just one link.
The way that Zoe has been collaborating with internal and external teams has been completely revolutionized. One feature Zoe finds particularly helpful is Playbook’s notifications whenever a creator uploads new content to their personal folder. She no longer has to sift through a flood of emails or lose content that might get accidentally deleted from the inbox. Plus, if a creator forgets to email her to let her know they’ve uploaded new content, it doesn’t matter because Playbook has her back.
Looking ahead: The future with Playbook
2025 will be the year of ramping up influencer marketing for BlendJet. Their marketing strategy will focus on scaling on influencer partnerships, content creation, and paid ads. To be successful in the eCommerce content game, they need to move fast. There is simply no time to wait for team members to track down the assets they need.
Playbook will be a key tool in scaling BlendJet’s creative processes as they work more closely with their community and begin raking in great content from influencers and creators. With Playbook, all that content will be organized by creator, date, theme, and perhaps campaign as well. Zoe can have a separate Playbook board for best-performing content on organic channels, which she can easily share with their paid ads specialist so he can run it as a paid Facebook ad. All he needs is a Playbook link.
When asked about what advice she would give to other eCommerce brands considering a digital asset management solution, Zoe shared: “Know your pain points. Understand which challenges are hindering your team’s performance the most, and hop on a call with the Playbook team to get a feel for how much easier your work life can be.”
For small creative teams managing large volumes of files like BlendJet’s, it’s important to reevaluate — is your team’s workflow and collaboration as efficient as it could be? See Playbook in action today.
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