Sol de Janeiro turns viral growth into a repeatable creative process with Globaledit

the situation

Brazilian-inspired bodycare brand Sol de Janeiro knows what viral growth looks like. After a breakout moment in 2020, their momentum only kept building, and with it came a skyrocketing demand for content. Their teams found themselves producing 10x the amount of finished images per campaign compared to just a few years prior, all while capturing content for multiple concurrent campaigns within each shoot.

The process that worked before—PDFs for retouching feedback, email chains and Asana for content requests, Dropbox for storage—needed a structural overhaul. Senior Studio Manager Jillian Patrick and Associate Director of Retouching Josh Deveaux set out to build an integrated, cross-functional creative workflow to address several key pain points:

• Lack of visual clarity: Teams navigated countless thumbnails and non-previewable content across multiple platforms, with no quick way to assess what assets existed and what still needed work.
• Lack of project transparency: Leadership couldn’t see what was being worked on, while project managers couldn’t easily communicate realistic timelines or make informed decisions about resource allocation.
• Asset backlog: Without a system to track which assets were final and in-market, the team saw a growing backlog of unused content.
• Ad hoc requests: New asks arrived through any channel at any time, making it difficult to hold teams accountable for changes in scope.

Get the full breakdown of how they built their creative workflow in Globaledit.

Take a look at how they built their creative workflow in Globaledit.

the solution

To address these challenges head-on, Patrick and Deveaux centralized Sol de Janeiro’s retouching, post-production, and newly-formed DAM teams in Globaledit as the core of their creative tech stack.

A visual library built for creatives

Globaledit’s visual-first library gave the Sol de Janeiro team quick, intuitive access to actual images and videos that they could infinitely scroll through, rather than lists of thumbnails, cryptic file names, or unviewable TIFFs. With a live, always-current view of their content universe, Sol De Janeiro’s art directors, creative directors, retouchers, and digital asset team could see exactly what was being worked on and where it stood in the lifecycle, without downloading and re-uploading files or switching platforms to review work in progress down to the details.

Jillian Patrick

Sr Studio Manager, Sol de Janeiro

“For us, Globaledit is where the asset lifecycle begins and where we track everything. If it’s not in Globaledit, it doesn’t exist.”

Key features for work in progress

Josh Deveaux credits several key features for changing the way his teams work daily. The studio and post-production teams use eight pre-built, nested Smart Collections to automatically organize assets based on their status: think “Retouching Notes Ready,” “Retouching – Work in Progress,” or “In Creative Review.” Each team treats its distinct Smart Collection like an inbox of actionable tasks that are instantly handed off downstream as soon as a status change indicates they’re ready, so they never have to navigate through the entire asset library. Creatives see their portion of their workflow; retouchers see theirs.

Giving feedback got easier, too. The creative team previously delivered feedback across PDFs, InDesign, Preview, and Photoshop, which left retouchers unsure of whether they were working from the latest notes. Globaledit’s in-platform markups and comments keep all retouching feedback in one place from R0 to final approval.

Transparency and accountability across teams

Sol de Janeiro integrated Globaledit with Airtable, their executive leadership’s preferred project management tool, to create a live reporting layer that connects creative work in progress with broader visibility. Whenever an asset is uploaded or status is changed in Globaledit, that data is automatically reflected in Airtable, giving leadership complete visibility into project statuses without having to be in the creative tools themselves.

Joshua Deveaux

Assistant Director of Retouching, Sol de Janeiro

“Priorities change quickly, and Globaledit allows us to track those changes hourly. It has become the staple of our process, which is essential for our team’s efficiency.”

This integration changed the nature of conversations between departments by providing visual proof of the work being done. With visibility into how many revision rounds an asset has accumulated, Patrick and Deveaux can make strategic decisions about where to invest their time, budget, and effort: If an asset has gone through eight rounds, is it worth continuing? What percentage of our total assets have undergone more than five revision rounds? With a holistic tracker of what gets made versus what actually gets used in-market, Sol de Janeiro’s executive producer can better justify timelines, allocate resources, and hold teams accountable for their asks.

looking forward

Globaledit gave Sol de Janeiro the infrastructure to scale their creative operations without compromising on quality, visibility, or accountability. As they continue building a beachy bodycare empire, the team plans to onboard more creative partners and additional internal teams onto the platform, integrate with more platforms in their tech stack so adjacent teams can self-serve, and build out their use of Globaledit’s AI metadata capabilities for smarter asset management. What started as a workflow upgrade has become the foundation for Sol de Janeiro’s creative production process, and they’re just getting started!