As businesses across Australia and around the world come to terms with a new distributed way of working, we take a look at the businesses that have been doing it like this all along.

Work has become suddenly and radically distributed. A recent Gartner study in March found that 88% of organisations have encouraged employees to work from home if they’re able to. 

While the circumstances we find ourselves in are new, the practice of remote work and managing distributed teams are not. Many businesses have mastered this way of working for years - here are just a few of the businesses that rely on Dropbox to get their best work done, from wherever they work best.  

Moleskine

Moleskine design and sell luxury notebooks. In recent years, the company decided to extended its product line to include digital apps and tools for working digitally and on the go. 

“As we have grown as a business, we have naturally expanded around the world. It means projects involve people, partnerships, and even shared ventures from wildly different locations across Asia, Australia, Europe and America, emphasizing our requirement to collaborate seamlessly on a central platform.”

Today, Moleskine has 29,000 stores across 95 countries. It globally distributed teams use Dropbox as a shared workspace to improve collaboration, encourage innovation, and speed up product development. This process happens largely behind the scenes, but eventuates in books on storeshelves, and apps on app stores.  

Moleskine’s distributed network happens through Dropbox every day, you can read more about it here. 

Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet makes a business out of travel - this includes the sense of wonder in the act of exploring, and the feeling of freedom that comes with a weekend away, or a holiday abroad. 

That business is driven by a team of writers out exploring the world and writing about their experiences in different places across the globe. All that coordination takes time and effort, and isn’t something that can be built overnight. 

“We’re a content-first business. We wouldn’t be able to deliver on our mission without our model of working, because what we do for a living is cover the world. And Dropbox is an enabler of that.” 

Lonely Planet uses Dropbox Paper to coordinate the teams of writers, photographers, editors and proofers to ensure that the content lives up to their standards. The creation of a Lonely Planet guide takes hundreds of writers across the globe covering more than 350,000 destinations to create their content. 

Find out more about Lonely Planet and their way of working here. 

Campos Coffee

Campos Coffee was founded in Newtown, Sydney. After years of operation, it started to source beans from Kenya to El Salvador, and set up roasteries in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. 

When the company was set up, crucial files for running the business were originally handled by a rudimentary intranet, and shared with team members and partners. In the words of the Campos founder “It was very clunky and wasn’t intuitive at all”. 

Campos now uses Dropbox Business as a single source of truth to keep its teams and cafés across Australia aligned and to streamline communication with coffee producers around the globe. 

“Every morning I wake up and go into Dropbox Business and I can see everything that’s happened in the last twenty hours. It’s all right there, clear and accurate.” 

Find out more about Campos Coffee and how they have managed an international team here. 

If you have questions about this story or want to speak with a member of the dropbox team, you can reach us at drop-everything@dropbox.com

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