I'm Arnaud DE SAINT JEAN from France, and I've been a graphic designer and art director for the past 15 years. The journey of Damvia began in 2019 while I was working as a Creative Service Manager for the brand PALLADIUM. My role involved creating marketing assets for global distribution and ensuring seamless access to these assets for our distributors. At the time, we hosted our assets on OneDrive, which led to numerous requests from B2B clients for zips of packshots corresponding to their orders. My colleague and I spent countless hours manually searching for these pictures as the search capabilities on cloud storage services were quite limited.

We needed a tool where we could paste a list of SKUs from an Excel file and instantly retrieve all available packshots. We also needed a more efficient way to display our assets beyond traditional folder structures, aiming to create rich pages to present seasonal collections and campaigns.

Additionally, we desired a DAM solution that was not overly complex or restrictive, allowing us to maintain control and flexibility. Moving an entire company to a new DAM system is a significant undertaking, and we wanted a tool that we could self-host and that was open-source.

After experimenting with WordPress, I realized we needed a custom solution for our specific needs. After three months of learning JavaScript, front-end, and back-end architecture, I developed a prototype, and we never looked back!

A few years later, in 2023, I left PALLADIUM to establish my creative agency, “Mon Agence Créative.” PALLADIUM needed additional editing functionalities as most of the content was hardcoded. I proposed building a second version of the DAM system so they could manage everything independently and ensure it was open-sourced, allowing them to self-host the DAM if anything happened to me.

After a year of development, we successfully implemented this new version, incorporating all the learnings and feedback we gathered over the years.

With great pride, PALLADIUM continues to host their DAM with our service, trusting us to deliver functionalities that meet their evolving needs. Damvia has grown into a robust, user-friendly DAM solution that empowers businesses to manage and showcase their assets efficiently and effectively.