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Giard
”What once was a strung together set of different tools and systems, Shade now takes the spot of being one central hub for our creative team. We can edit in one place, search in one place, and deliver in one place. I can’t really imagine going back to what we previously had.”
Teddy Giard
CEO & Founder @ Giard & Co.
WEBSITE
giard.co
HEADQUARTERS
Greenville, SC
STRUCTURE
Hybrid, Contractors
INDUSTRY
Marketing & Brand Strategy
SWITCHED FROM
Dropbox, Frame.io
1
About Giard & Co.
Private equity portfolio of lifestyle brands with productized creative services
Giard & Co. runs a private equity portfolio of lifestyle brands, scaling companies from five to fifty million in revenue. Over the years, they've identified core service offerings that lifestyle brands consistently need and have productized these services into their business model. They use these creative and strategic arms to either launch their own brands within their portfolio, advise other brands as equity or revenue-share partners, or service the broader industry, generating operating capital to continue investing in their own portfolio. With a lethal team of five full-time members and 30+ specialized contractors, Giard & Co focuses on what they do best: delivering performance-driven creative assets and distributing them at scale.
2
The Challenge
Creative teams burning out from reactive workflows and endless guessing games
Like most brands, Giard & Co's workflow used to follow a familiar but inefficient pattern: come up with ideas, hand them to the creative department, shoot the concept, go through revisions, reshoot if needed, and repeat. This reactive cycle led to creative team burnout and inconsistent brand voice, especially as the demand for optimized content across multiple platforms (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube) continued to grow.
However they had an even bigger problem… Every new concept was a guessing game. Digital marketers and creative strategists would request ad iterations without understanding the capital, labor, or time required to produce assets. When analyzing performance, teams were looking at entire ads, which have too much variability, rather than the individual clips that actually drive results. With assets scattered across multiple tools and no centralized system for organizing, rating, or repurposing footage, the team was constantly reinventing the wheel instead of building on what already worked.
Learn why top agencies, global brands, and high-growth enterprises use Shade.
3
Introduction to Shade
A centralized stock footage library that learns what performs best
The fit with Shade was immediate. Giard & Co needed a platform that could serve as a unified creative hub, one place to upload, organize, search, and deliver creative assets. But more importantly, they needed a system that could help them shift from guessing to optimizing.
With Shade's AI-powered indexing and search, Giard & Co could finally treat their own footage like a proprietary stock library. Every shoot became an investment in a searchable, reusable asset database. The team implemented a rating system to track which clips converted best, and suddenly they weren't just creating content, they were building a performance-driven library that informed every future creative decision. What once was a strung-together set of different tools and systems, was now unified creative infrastructure where they can access, search, and deliver all in one place.
4
The New Workflow
From reactive guessing to data-driven creative optimization
With Shade, Giard & Co's production workflow has fundamentally changed. Now, the team prioritizes shoots that produce individual lifestyle clips, building blocks that can be mixed, matched, and tested, rather than executing full, rigid concepts. Every shoot is uploaded to Shade as raw assets, where editors can pull footage, and clients are given access to the backend database of color-graded assets via collections.
The game-changer is the rating system. Giard & Co tests ads with the same script, audio, and text, but swaps out different hooks with different clips. When a clip performs well, it gets rated (three, four, or five stars), and that rating feeds back into the asset library. Now, when the team needs to create new content, they filter by top-performing clips and build on what's already proven to convert.
The Collections feature has streamlined client delivery, too. After each shoot, Giard & Co creates a collection of color-corrected stills and motion assets, then adds those assets to the master B-roll library. Clients get their own searchable database, and the team has a living archive that grows smarter with every project.
5
Present Outcome
More output, less burnout, and a scalable path to AI-powered creative expansion
Since adopting Shade, Giard & Co has eliminated the time their team used to spend manually indexing footage. Editors, web developers, paid advertisers, and organic content creators all save time by pulling from a centralized, searchable library instead of digging through scattered files. The team's creative output has increased across organic, paid, and website content, and conversion rates have improved because they're building on data, not hunches.
Looking ahead, Giard & Co is positioning Shade as the foundation for an even bigger shift. By integrating Shade's top-performing clips with AI tools like Sora and Runway, they plan to use their highest-rated footage as prompts to generate new creative variations, testing different models, environments, and product colorways without the time and cost of additional shoots. In Teddy's words, the future isn't about big brother agencies selling massive concepts, it's about small, nimble teams that can take an idea from concept to execution, and Shade is the creative infrastructure that makes that possible.
