Two hundred colleagues, one factory for shutters, shading and ventilation
Wilms designs and manufactures roller shutters, shading and ventilation systems in Meerhout, Belgium. Two hundred colleagues work at the site, and two-thirds of them are on the production floor, turning out around 50,000 shutters, blinds and ventilation units a year.
The other third sits in commercial and marketing roles, because Wilms sells B2B: every product reaches the market through an extensive dealer network across Belgium, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. That network runs on product photography as much as it runs on price lists and technical spec sheets.
Forget the old folder tree. Dump every photo into one library, tag it, and from there you can search your whole photo history without friction. That was a bit of a revelation for us.
A folder tree only marketing could read
Before Clipido, every photo lived on an internal server in a tree structure Marketing Manager Wim Lenaers describes candidly: one that mostly made sense to the person who built it. Finding an image meant knowing the folder logic first, because the tree offered no way to search by what was actually in a picture, or where it was taken.
That had real costs. The server took up serious space and sat apart from the rest of the infrastructure, which made Wilms's IT team uneasy about the setup. New colleagues joining the growing marketing team faced a steep learning curve just to retrieve a photo, and even long-tenured staff sometimes struggled to place an old shot: was that shoot from 2021 or 2022? Nobody was entirely sure.
The heaviest cost landed on the commercial side. Photos never left the server on their own. A rep who needed a close-up of a specific roller shutter for a client had to email marketing and wait for someone to search the archive and forward the file. Offering that same self-service to an actual customer was not even on the table.
Wilms already ran a dealer platform, Wilms World, for price lists, technical sheets and other reference material, with a marketing section for photography. But those images sat there as static downloads: a zip file with fifteen roller shutter photos, another with fifteen screens, one more for awnings. Dealers downloaded what was in the zip, and what was in the zip stayed the same until someone manually replaced it.
From a fixed snapshot to a living library
Clipido replaced that static model with a library the marketing team keeps current continuously. When a new shoot comes in, the images are searchable within two days, available the moment a rep or dealer needs them rather than whenever someone gets around to updating a zip file.
It works the other way too. When a product or a colour leaves the range, marketing pulls or unpublishes those images, so nobody downloads a shot of something that is no longer for sale. The library reflects the current catalogue instead of an archive that quietly drifts out of date.
Four groups, one library, one still to come
Wim counts four stakeholder groups the library now serves. Marketing itself uses it daily, for social, ads, online and print. The commercial team, Wilms's reps, pulls images for client questions, presentations and prospecting, showing exactly how a product looks finished before a deal is even close.
External partners are the third group. An advertising partner who needed roller shutter imagery used to mean Wilms spending an hour gathering files, converting formats and sending them over. Now that partner gets direct access to search and pick images themselves, and Wim notes their own expertise sometimes surfaces a better-performing shot than the one marketing would have picked.
The fourth group is the one still ahead: giving Wilms's B2B dealers direct access through the existing customer portal, to exactly the product images relevant to them, nothing from an internal event or a staff shoot. Visual content matters more every year, for Wilms and for the dealers building their own showrooms and social presence, and Wim wants that self-service in place because speed matters: a dealer who cannot find a Wilms photo fast enough is one search away from a generic stock image or an AI-generated one, in an article that is supposed to be about a genuine Wilms product.
Face recognition, filling in as it's used
Wilms is a products business first, so face recognition sees lighter use than product search, but Jill Cruysberghs, the library's most active user, has watched the value build. Clipido suggested tagging a colleague she had found by filename, and every tag like that makes the next search for that person easier. Wim expects the payoff to compound: a year or two from now, pulling every photo of someone leaving after years at the company should be a search, not a scavenger hunt.
It already helps with lighter, recurring tasks: assembling the internal magazine, building a calendar with the right faces, or answering the kind of request that used to mean scrolling past a hundred photos to find someone's most recent one for a LinkedIn update.
