Challenge: Stock Image Management at Scale
The Vault Stock is a fast-growing creative stock platform offering aesthetic visuals, AI-generated collections, video content, and design templates to a global membership base.
As their library scaled, so did the complexity of managing, organizing, and delivering content to members—without compromising on visual quality or user experience.
Before Playbook, The Vault Stock relied on a combination of Clipara + Squarespace to host and deliver their content. While functional, the system created major limitations as their library grew:
- Unreliable search due to inconsistent manual tagging
- Queries like “flower” often failed to return relevant results
- No AI tagging, color filtering, or orientation filters
- Collections behaved unpredictably due to tag overlap
- Managing ~10,000 assets (and growing weekly) became increasingly inefficient
“Our workflow used to be quite manual, which naturally came with some inefficiencies.”
At the same time, migrating away from Squarespace wasn’t an option—they needed a solution that could layer into their existing membership experience, not replace it.
They also explored DAM alternatives like Frontify, but found them overly expensive and still lacking key creative-first features.
The Solution
With Playbook, The Vault Stock was able to upgrade their entire asset experience—without fully uprooting their core platform. Instead, they:
- Embedded a Playbook published page directly into their Squarespace site
- Used secure share links to keep content gated behind their membership
- Leveraged AI-powered tagging and search to make discovery effortless
- Introduced additional visual filters like color and content-based search
Playbook also worked closely with the team to build custom solutions tailored to their workflow: scheduled asset publishing, secure embedded galleries, and advanced color filtering for stock discovery.
Impact: Faster Asset Discovery, Smoother Workflows, and a Scalable Member Experience
With Playbook, The Vault Stock transformed both their internal workflows and customer experience—making it easier to manage, discover, and scale a growing asset library.
Today, they support:
- Thousands of members globally
- 100+ new assets uploaded weekly
- A rapidly expanding library of images, videos, and templates
... all while maintaining the platform they already use and love.
“Playbook really ticks all the boxes for us. It’s made our workflow smoother and more efficient… it’s a platform we genuinely enjoy using.”
- Anna Hamilton, Creative 2IC
Faster workflows, simpler organization
What used to be a manual, time-consuming process is now intuitive and efficient. The team can quickly upload, organize, and manage thousands of assets without friction.
“The drag and drop functionality is a standout—it’s simple but makes organising and managing assets so much more efficient.”
A dramatically better browsing experience for members
Members can now easily explore and discover content using visual search, color filtering, and AI-powered tagging—without relying on perfect metadata.
“The platform is intuitive, and as a visually driven creative company, we really value its clean, well-designed interface.”
Insights that guide creative direction
Beyond organization, Playbook unlocked something new: visibility into performance and customer behavior. Playbook’s analytics give the team visibility into both internal performance and customer behavior—helping them understand what resonates and make smarter creative decisions.
“The analytics have been a huge win for us. They give us clear visibility across both internal performance and customer behaviour.”
A platform the team actually enjoys using
Beyond functionality, Playbook has improved the day-to-day experience of working with a large creative library—with speed, simplicity, and hands-on support making a real difference.
“We found other platforms to be clunky and limiting. Playbook has completely changed that—it’s incredibly easy to use, and the customer support is exceptional. The speed and quality of responses have genuinely impressed us and made a big difference to our day to day.”
Looking Ahead
As The Vault Stock continues to grow, Playbook has evolved beyond a digital asset management tool into a true product and growth partner.
Working closely together, Playbook has helped bring key feature requests to life, from color filtering to secure embedded galleries and custom browsing experiences tailored to their members.
These improvements haven’t just streamlined workflows—they’ve directly enhanced The Vault Stock’s customer experience and product offering, allowing the Vault Stock to expand beyond traditional stock imagery into:
- Brand shoots and premium content offerings
- A growing creative marketplace and templates library
- More interactive and curated member experiences (e.g. mood boarding, favoriting)
With Playbook as its foundation, The Vault Stock is set up to continuously evolve—improving discovery, enhancing member experiences, and expanding into new creative and commercial offerings.
👉 Ready to give your team the same advantage? Schedule a demo with Playbook today!