I have been advising Banana Republic for the past few months in connection with digital assets (product photography) for their newly launched Home line, which is quite different than their main apparel business because of the sheer volume of product involved.
We are using Airtable to manage the capture and post production for a large volume of digital assets // 5,000+SKUs // 15,000+ digital assets. We are using Airtable as a single asset repository and workflow to unify and streamline digital capture, creative review, and post-production (retouching) workflows. The end result of this project will end up in a custom-designed, enterprise-level Shopify storefront.
As with many large organizations, the main challenge we face is organizational fracture and data siloing, resulting from the use of multiple specialized database solutions across various parts of the organization. It's all very nice to streamline our digital asset process within AT, but all the product/variant info is coming from ERP and PIM systems.
I believe that huge gains in efficiency and data integrity could be achieved by using Airtable to replace specialized databases such as ERP, PIM, DAM, just as it can replace dedicated CRM and PM tools. While some tools would claim to benefit from specialization for functionality and robustness, Airtable's versatility could allow it to be one central "source of truth" instead of a plurality of "walled gardens".
