How Jar helps creative teams make clients happier with Box Platform

Location: Phoenix, AZ

Industry: Design

Use Case: File Management, Review, and Approval

Summary

Jar is a creative request management tool that enables creative teams to run more profitable businesses with happier clients. Built by Design Pickle, a graphic design company that works with thousands of clients, designing hundreds of thousands of graphics, Jar is a tool to help creative teams like the team at Design Pickle manage design requests. Jar leverages Box Platform to power easy file management and sharing between creative teams and their clients.

Challenge

Creative teams struggle with keeping ongoing work requests organized. Project briefs, specifications, files, revisions, and sketches can easily get lost in email, forgotten from the project management tool, left off the calendar, and never properly assigned to a designer. When a client asks for a status update, retracing communications and finding the files and information the client needs becomes a time suck that takes away from productive creation time.

Jar is a creative request management tool that leverages Box Platform for file management, review, and client approval

Solution

With Jar, there’s no more rifling through multiple applications. Jar’s smart, powerful, and insanely simple user interface keeps everything organized. Each team’s workload is 100% visible with nothing hidden in a team member’s inbox.

Jar users can browse through client files and folders

Jar’s integration with Box Platform lets team members easily upload, preview, manage, and share their creative work with their team. Meanwhile, clients can see their work history, current projects, make new requests, and view, share, and download their past and current files through their client dashboard.

Backed by the power of Box, Jar provides a single place for creative teams to manage their ongoing requests — so they can get out of their inbox and back to the work that matters.

Jar uses Box Platform to create an organized folder and file structure to hold every creative asset a designer creates for their client. Specifically, Jar uses the following Box APIs to add functionality to our application:

Jar users can preview files directly in the file manager using Box Content Preview

• Box Content Preview to give Jar users a quick look at files in the browser
• Secure file storage to house all folder structures and files
• Users and permissions to keep everything secure and scoped from client to client

Jar users can select files for upload and see upload progress as they are uploaded to Box behind the scenes

Jar is a web application with a client-side Javascript implementation built using React and a Flux architecture and a Ruby-based server-side setup of scoped folder structures and user permissions. Jar leverages the Box Ruby SDK, available here on Github. Jar leverages several other cloud services, including Stripe, Intercom, AWS, CircleCI, Pusher, and Rollbar.

Looking forward, the Jar team plans on implementing even more features of Box Platform in their application. They have plans to integrate metadata and search capabilities, and will be looking to offer users a “Bring Your Own Box Account” to Jar. Currently, Jar leverages Box Platform App Users to manage user accounts, but users would be able to connect their existing Box accounts and pull their creative assets they already store in their Box accounts into Jar.

To get started, sign up for a Jar account here. If you’d like to learn more about building apps on Box Platform, please visit the Box Developer site.