Rapid growth is great for online retailers until it brings content chaos, explains Roxanne Lewington, growth marketing manager at Canto, ahead of her appearance at RetailX’s Autumn Retail Festival 2025.
Growth is the North Star for many online retailers. Every year the goal seems to be exceeding last year’s targets – driving even more traffic, achieving a higher conversion rate, growing the team, and ultimately boosting profitability. And scaling-up is brilliant (definitely far better than the alternative!) but it also brings unforeseen challenges for the way businesses manage their digital assets and content.
Digital asset management is something I’m semi-obsessed with, as I’ve seen first-hand how impactful it can be on businesses which get it right, and how problematic for those who get it wrong. So, I’m excited to be speaking at the DTC Brands Summit in London on 8th October. In my view, this is one of the highlights of the industry calendar, and it’s a privilege to share the stage with panellists from Philip Kingsley, Be For Beauty, Biotiful Gut Health, and our ChannelX moderator.
But back to the matter at hand: the chaos that retailers can sleepwalk into if they don’t get a grip on their content lifecycle.
Content chaos
Let’s look at some facts around content. More than three in four marketers (77%) expect their content output to increase year-on-year, according to Canto’s State of Digital Content 2025 report. It’s no surprise that demand for content is on the rise, especially when consumers are viewing ever-more images and video on their devices, and businesses are asking more from their content teams.
But at the same time, 17% of marketers are facing budget cuts, and only a quarter say they’ve got the right tools to effectively produce the digital content being asked of them.
Now take this squeeze from both directions and apply it to a fast-growing online retail business. Very soon, you see marketers struggling to create content effectively, mistakes made on your e-commerce platforms, missed opportunities, delayed product launches, and all the other inconsistencies that damage consumer trust.
The key insight for me is this: there’s probably nothing wrong with your content, the problem is in your workflow. It is possible to meet growing content demands, but not if you have inefficient processes, low productivity, and an ineffective tech stack.
Productivity gains
If you need to bring your organisation’s content management up-to-speed with your global reach, then the way to achieve this is through new ways of working enabled by the right tools.
To provide an example, look at the international cycling and outdoor accessories brand Knog. This is a business that was launched in Australia in 2002 by two friends, and over the past two decades, grew from a two-person startup to a global brand with products sold by thousands of retailers in more than 40 countries.
It’s an amazing success story, but behind the scenes was an approach to digital content that wasn’t fit-for-purpose: assets saved on local servers or cloud storage, with the inevitable broken links, outdated files, and so on.
By introducing a digital asset management (or DAM) platform – a solution that provided one central hub for storing, managing and distributing all Knog’s digital assets – the marketing and product teams were able to achieve 20% productivity gains. The company also saw a 100% reduction in asset-related complaints. All from getting the right tech stack.
Cutting inefficiencies
The content chaos I mentioned earlier is something marketers live with day-in, day-out. In fact, some marketers and designers estimate they spend up to a quarter of their time tracking down assets that already exist, emailing files to colleagues or distributors, and doing other low-value tasks. It’s all too easy for online retailers to drift into these inefficient ways of working, but such processes are absolutely avoidable.
Another brief example comes from global pet-care brand Beaphar, which operates in 86 countries selling more than 2,800 products. This is a large heritage company founded more than 80 years ago, and its designers were overloaded with requests. Again, after introducing a DAM platform so that the wider team could self-serve the content they wanted, Beaphar found around 20-25% efficiency gains. And those significant time savings can lead to successful new product launches or expansion into new markets.
To sum up, sometimes it’s tempting for online retailers to prioritise growth while forgetting the importance of their workflow. But lay the right foundations today and it will help you avoid content chaos in future. Buy-in the right tools, automate certain tasks, and give your organisation one single source of the truth. Free up your creative teams so they can focus on higher-value work like developing new campaigns and pushing packaging updates and retailer programmes. That’s the way to achieve growth that’s not only rapid but sustainable too.
Join Roxanne from Canto on 8 October 2025 at 10:20am on the DTC Brands stage at the Autumn Retail Festival 2025, for a discussion on how D2C brands can use AI, predictive analytics and dynamic content to improve personalisation, connect meaningfully with customers and nurture loyalty. Register here for your tickets to the Autumn Retail Festival 2025.
