The Missing Step
For years, every engagement we walked into started the same way: no clear picture of a client’s metadata, no understanding of how their assets were structured. We built MQS to solve that problem for our team. Now we are opening it to the industry, because the problem belongs to all of us.
MQS did not start as a product. It started as a problem we could not solve with existing tools.
I spent years as a photographer composing frames: foreground, midground, background. In 2016, a connective tissue disorder changed everything. Open heart surgery. Vision loss. The camera work was no longer possible. But the way I see things never changed. I just started applying it to a different kind of problem.
In 2018, I founded Stacks, a professional services business in the digital asset management space. Every engagement starts the same way. We ask the client: tell us about your assets. How many? What file types? What does the metadata look like? The answer is almost always the same. No clue.
My operations team had no way to assess what we were walking into before scoping the work. So I worked with Shelley Meeks, who brings over 25 years of experience in digital asset management, to develop the scoring model that became MQS. It was not designed in a lab. It was built by people who manage metadata at scale every day.
“Data has a story. MQS helps tell it.”
Casey Templeton, Founder, MQS
Three principles that guide how we build and share MQS.
Every project that goes sideways starts the same way. Someone skipped the step where you look at what you actually have. MQS exists because that step did not exist as a standard practice. Now it does.
MQS was not built for one company. The scoring model is fixed. The reports are immutable. No one can modify the output to fit a sales pitch. We are building toward a partner directory that connects organizations with the right service provider across the full DAM, MAM, and PIM landscape.
Metadata is the part of the system nobody looks at until something breaks. MQS gives organizations a way to see what they have before they decide what to do with it.
MQS is live and growing. Here is what we have built and where we are going.
Upload a metadata export. Get a structural health assessment. The platform is operational today.
Platform Program, Professional Services, and Practitioner Program live. Team workspaces with shared reports, member management, and client tracking.
MQS is open to all organizations managing digital assets. Free reports, paid upgrades, and the full ecosystem of programs for platforms, consultants, and practitioners.
Direct API connectors to DAM, PIM, and CMS platforms for automated assessments. A curated directory connecting organizations with vetted service providers across the digital asset management landscape.