Posted by Dan Hartley, Global Innovation Manager at AllSaints

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to enable new, better ways of working in their organisations. Today’s guest blogger is Dan Hartley, Global Innovation Manager at AllSaints, a global contemporary fashion brand based out of East London.

For 20 years, AllSaints has mixed old world craftsmanship with new world design to create contemporary clothing that’s as fashionable and relevant on the sidewalks of New Delhi as it is on the streets of New York, Paris and LA. Our aesthetic is sharp and innovative. After all, we’re named after All Saints Road in Notting Hill, a hub for new music and art.

We’re driven by experimentation and creativity and constantly test out new approaches to our style, whether it’s our photography, marketing videos, music sessions or even showroom furniture. Until recently though, our employees were burdened by a technology platform that made it hard to take creative risks or move quickly. That is, until we moved to Google Apps which transformed the way we work.


A video made by AllSaints about collaboration and innovation.

Google’s tools help make our teams feel closer and more connected to each other, from the designers at AllSaints Studios in East London, to our factories and regional offices in Turkey, Portugal and Hong Kong, to our retail stores throughout the world. We don’t have to rely on email to request an up-to-date document and wait a full day for someone from another region to send it back as an attachment, only to discover their version is obsolete because someone else edited a different copy. Now, our 2,500 employees across 120 stores and 10 regional offices store all their files in Drive, and can rest assured they’re always working on the most up-to-date version. This has also encouraged and developed a much more cross functional working environment, leading to ideas and solutions that may have otherwise never been imagined.

Google Drive has transformed how we store and share files of all kinds across the entire organisation. In AllSaints Studios, we used to have one shared network drive to store all of our files, which suffered from slow load times since so many people used it at once. It got to a point where our photo department used a separate hard drive to handle their own large file formats. With Google Drive, everyone — including the photo department — can access documents anytime, without any performance issues. We use desktop sync, an application installed on the computer that puts a Drive folder on the desktop, to automatically store large files on our computers as well.

We’ve also replaced our old intranet for retail managers with department specific Google+ Communities that are open to the entire organisation. Each week, we release a set of directives that outline where to place new styles on the shop floor. Before moving to Google, we published this information in a PDF on our intranet, and if anything changed during the week, retail managers would receive an email alert and have to find the file on the intranet, download it, then print a number of copies of the new version to hand out to their team. Now, we have a shared Drive folder for Directives, and each manager can pull up the file from their Nexus tablet as they walk around the shop floor, knowing what they’re looking at is always up to date.

We’ve found a technology partner in Google that improves our workflow and processes and enables us to concentrate on the creative work. With Google Drive, we have the tools at our fingertips to turn ideas into fashion, films and other works that inspire and ignite confidence and independence.