From Silos to Self-Service at Fanatics

How Fanatics Scaled Digital Asset Management Across 10 Million Assets

INSIDE FANATICS' DAM & CONTENT OPERATIONS STRATEGY

Adapted from an Orange Logic webinar hosted by Hope Mare Segan. Questions have been consolidated and rewritten for clarity. Watch the full on-demand webinar below to hear directly from Julie Warwick, Digital Asset Manager at Fanatics.

The challenge: managing millions of assets across a growing global business

Fanatics manages more than 10 million digital assets supporting its e-commerce and wholesale operations, with over 300 partners, suppliers, and vendors across 11 countries. As the business expanded, duplicate assets, inconsistent naming conventions, siloed systems, and complex access requirements made it increasingly difficult for teams to find and use the right content.

Julie Warwick, Digital Asset Manager at Fanatics, leads the company's DAM operations, supporting more than 200 internal users and 500 external users. Her team partnered with Orange Logic to consolidate assets and product data into a centralized, self-service platform. By eliminating duplication, tailoring access by team, and simplifying asset discovery, Fanatics is making it easier for people to find what they need while laying the foundation for automated content workflows.

INTERVIEW WITH FANATICS

Q: Can you describe the scale of Fanatics' digital asset operations and how they've evolved?

Julie Warwick: I've been the Digital Asset Manager here at Fanatics for six years, and it's been really exciting to see how much we've grown. Fanatics is a leading sports merchandise company serving both e-commerce and wholesale channels. We currently have a little over 10 million assets in our DAM, and we're expecting another five million soon. We have over 200 internal users and more than 500 external users.

When I joined Fanatics six years ago, we had just under a million assets, so we've grown roughly tenfold during that time. We now work with over 300 partners, suppliers, and vendors across 11 countries. We're not just operating stateside. We have an international presence as well, and it's a very vast ecosystem that we've been managing, especially over the last few years.

Q: What challenges led Fanatics to look for a new DAM platform?

Julie Warwick: Orange Logic is actually our second DAM. Our previous vendor was great for what we needed at the time, but as we kept growing, our needs were growing too. We were bringing on more partnerships, working with more vendors, and having to consider different requirements for how assets needed to be presented, stored, and accessed. We started noticing limitations in scalability. One thing I'd recommend to anyone considering a new DAM is to understand your vendor's roadmap. When we looked at our previous vendor's roadmap, we realized it didn't align with what we wanted for the future of our DAM. They were focused on initiatives that weren't priorities for us, which meant the things we needed would likely be an afterthought.

We also had some significant operational challenges. There was extreme asset duplication, different naming conventions, limited ability to tailor access for specific partners, and a lot of siloed storage. We knew we needed a platform that could scale with us and give us more flexibility in how we managed our assets. When we started evaluating Orange Logic, we realized how much more was possible. Their functionality allowed us to think outside the box when it came to metadata, permissions, and visibility based on how our teams actually work. They also helped us brainstorm what our DAM could become. We'd bring them an issue or a requirement, and they would help us take it a step further. It made us realize, "Wow, we really could make this DAM reach its full potential." There were capabilities we had felt restricted from using with our previous vendor, like searching for multiple assets at once. Orange Logic was able to configure that for us, and throughout the process, we kept discovering ways to address the issues we'd been dealing with.

Q: What was your vision for the new DAM, and how did you approach bringing so many different teams and systems together?

Julie Warwick: We really wanted our DAM to be the single source of truth, available to all our partners outside of Fanatics as well as our internal teams. Originally, we were an e-commerce business, then we acquired wholesale and other businesses over the years. Each of those businesses had different processes, so there was a lot of collaboration involved in figuring out how to bring everything together into one ecosystem. One of the things we wanted was a more personalized experience for users. On our DAM homepage, for example, we can have specific tiles and resources dedicated to certain teams that other teams don't need to see. We have forms for our web-ready imagery in case there are image discrepancies, but our art teams don't necessarily need those forms. They might need something completely different for their processes. We were able to create those different experiences within the same DAM.

On the back end, we also wanted to bring together our different data sources. We have e-commerce data, wholesale data, and additional data sources from other teams we've brought into the business. It's funny because when you're working with all these different processes and data sources outside the DAM, and then you try to centralize everything, you start noticing the hiccups in those processes. It's kind of like a domino effect. We had to think outside the box about how we wanted everything to work because we didn't want the DAM to be just a library for images. We wanted it to be a data hub too. If someone needed specific imagery for e-commerce, they shouldn't have to go into the e-commerce database or request access to another system just to find product information. They should be able to go into the DAM and get everything they need, whether that information comes from e-commerce, wholesale, or another source. That created a lot less stress and confusion for our teams. They could just go into the DAM and get exactly what they needed.

Q: You mentioned extreme asset duplication. How did you solve that problem?

Julie Warwick: This is probably one of my favorite things about Orange Logic because it's something I remember wishing we had years ago. I remember thinking, "Man, I really wish we had something like this, but I don't even know if it exists." When we started evaluating Orange Logic, we realized they could do exactly what we needed. Previously, we might have a wholesale product image, and if that same product was purchased by our e-commerce business, we'd also have an e-commerce product image. So we'd end up with duplicates of the same image, each with a different file naming convention. That created inconsistent naming, took up a lot of storage, and caused confusion for users.

With Orange Logic, we were able to create separate metadata panels for wholesale and e-commerce information, then use API integrations to pull data from those different sources into a single asset. We decided that the wholesale image would be the primary image in the DAM. If e-commerce information existed for that product, the API would identify the matching wholesale ID in our e-commerce data source and automatically update the e-commerce metadata on that same image. That eliminated the need to maintain separate copies. Before, someone searching for a product might see multiple versions of the same image with different names. They'd wonder, "Which one do I pick? Which one's more accurate?" Now, whether someone searches by the product ID or the wholesale ID, they're directed to the same assets containing the information for both wholesale and e-commerce.

Q: How did users respond to having that information consolidated into one place?

Julie Warwick: Relieved. Everybody was very relieved. No matter what they searched for, they could get to that one asset with all the data they needed. It improved people's processes too. When you think about a DAM, the majority of users just want to get in there, grab their data or images, and get out so they can move on to the next thing they need to do. They don't want to spend time figuring out which image is correct or why something is named a certain way.

Before, we'd get emails asking, "Which one do I grab?" or "Why is this named this way?" or "This doesn't represent what I was looking for." Now, they can search using the information they're familiar with, find the right assets, and move on with their day. It created a lot less confusion for users and fewer questions coming to our team.

Q: Another capability you prioritized was searching for multiple assets at once. Why was that so important, and how does it work?

Julie Warwick: This was probably our biggest ask, and it wasn't necessarily coming from my team. It was coming from all the users who work in the DAM every single day. We're a very high-volume company. People aren't always searching for one e-commerce or wholesale product. They might be working on catalogs, presentations, or other projects where they need hundreds or thousands of images at once. I love this story because when we told Caleb at Orange Logic about what we needed, he was able to configure it in a single weekend. We started testing it the following week, and it worked perfectly. A couple of weeks later, we were able to push it live. That was huge for us because people can now search for and download thousands of images at a time.

Most of our users already have lists of product IDs or item IDs in Excel spreadsheets. They can simply copy that column and paste it into the DAM search. Caleb configured the search so that it recognizes each line as a separate item ID, product ID, or file name. You can also search using comma-separated terms. If I wanted to search for the New York Yankees, New York Mets, and New York Jets, I could type those in with commas between them. But because our users are typically searching for hundreds or thousands of assets, copying and pasting a column from Excel is what they do about 99% of the time.

Q: How did you design permissions and access for so many different internal teams and external partners?

Julie Warwick: My biggest recommendation here is communication with your teams. As a DAM manager, you can't really be the end-all, be-all where whatever you say is final. Our job exists because of the teams that work in the DAM. We're basically the mediator, making sure they have what they need. Leading up to our launch, we held one-on-one meetings with different teams to understand their processes, their needs, and what they were trying to accomplish. We wanted to understand what worked for the teams uploading and editing assets, but also what the end users needed to see. For example, our Nike team might need access to a specific tier of assets and products, while another Nike team should only be able to see a different group of assets. We used those conversations to document requirements, create user groups, and determine permissions.

One of the things we loved about Orange Logic was the ability to control access based on metadata, not just folders. As we grew, it became clear that access wasn't one-size-fits-all. Someone might need access to most of the images in a catalog, but only a portion of certain images because of an upcoming launch. We needed that level of control. It's funny because when we implemented Orange Logic, our word of the year was "granularity." There were so many ways we could configure things to meet specific needs. During the demos, I'd ask, "Can you do this, or can you do that? Which one is it?" And more than half the time, the answer was, "We can do both." Having that flexibility, combined with the knowledge we gained from talking to our teams, allowed us to create more customized self-service experiences. At the end of the day, we're here to streamline things and make people's jobs easier in the DAM, with as little interruption to their processes as possible.

Q: Can you give an example of how those permissions work in practice?

Julie Warwick: For us, it's a mix of folder permissions and metadata permissions, depending on the product and the team. We have our normal catalog where we store assets that have already launched. We generally split security groups into two user groups per team: internal and external. Internal users might be able to view, upload, and edit imagery across different statuses. External users typically only need to view and download active imagery that's already launched.

But then we add another layer with metadata permissions. For example, a team might have access to the Fanatics catalog, but their work is specifically related to Nike. They don't need to see everything in that catalog. We can configure their permissions so that, within that folder, they only see assets tagged as Nike. Instead of seeing 50,000 images, they might only see 10,000 relevant images. There are definitely layers to it, but it allows us to give people access to the DAM while tailoring what they see to their actual needs.

Q: What benefits have you seen since launching the centralized DAM?

Julie Warwick: One of the biggest things we've seen is that the DAM has become much more widely used across the company. Before, it was very department-specific. After we launched Orange Logic, it slowly started becoming company-wide. Teams outside our department began reaching out and saying, "Hey, I'm really interested in Orange Logic. We're having this issue. Could it fix this?" We'd have a discovery call with them and then work on getting their assets and processes migrated into the DAM. It's become our one-stop shop. It's not just finished, web-ready product imagery anymore. It's brand assets, art imagery, and other types of content. We've also been able to create microsites for some of our customers who only need to see a specific view of their assets.

Security has been another important benefit. We have a lot of security mandates in place, and we've been able to minimize a lot of our leaks. If we do have a leak, reporting is a big thing for us. We can track the behavior of a specific image, understand what happened, and address the issue. It's become our hub for data and security, and everything else has started to follow.

Q: What's next for Fanatics' DAM strategy?

Julie Warwick: Our biggest focus right now is building a workflow for our art teams. We started discussing this project soon after launching the DAM, so it's been about a year in development. We're getting ready to launch the workflow in the next month or two. It includes statuses, permissions, and a lot of automations. The idea is that everything flows through the workflow, and users can go in and do what they need to do without having to communicate so many things outside the system. Less emails.

We want the DAM to become a centralized hub not just for the library of finished assets, but for the creation of art imagery too. And it's not just our art teams. Other departments within Fanatics are interested in these workflows as well. We're looking at cross-departmental workflows and ways to limit the number of tools we're using. Ultimately, we're looking at Orange Logic as a single source, not just for live, finished, web-ready assets, but also for the creation process. So nothing really leaves the DAM. That's what we're aiming towards.