White Stuff gets PIM boost

Clothing brand White Stuff has improved product experiences across its owned and third party retail channels with a new partnership

Traditionally, White Stuff had no single source of truth for product data across its sales channels, with data sets stored on legacy systems or on excel sheets, which needed manual input at each stage of the product life cycle.  This was impacting data quality and consistency of the product information available to internal teams, third parties and customers. Additionally, the process to enrich product data was operationally inefficient.

Wanting to enrich product data to improve customer experience and make its collections even more shoppable, White Stuff wanted to unify its product data on a single platform.  The fashion brand also wanted to ensure that the product experiences it delivered to its resale retail partners were not only consistent and information-rich but would ensure the brand’s identity and values would be upheld when merchandised on third party retailers’ websites.

Having conducted a thorough review of the PIM market, it selected Akeneo because of the usability and accessible user-interface of the solution, as well as Akeneo’s open-API infrastructure and MACH architecture.  This composable configuration will allow White Stuff to effectively scale at pace and integrate the PIM with the tech stack in the long term as it evolves with the needs of the business.

“We were looking for a partner that could deliver not only across an operational lens, creating greater efficiencies and quicker time to market for example.  But we also needed a partner that could deliver against a customer lens, creating better online experiences and ease of search to improve conversions.  And Akeneo ticked all of these boxes,” said Steve Borg, head of technology at White Stuff.

Pilot

White Stuff piloted Akeneo’s PIM solution in December 2021 on its SS22 dress category, using the trial to test the PIM attribution process and the associated product feed-process.  Having seen improvements in operational efficiencies and speed to market – with improved data enrichment and less manual data entries helping it move from a daily product update served through the ERP system to multiple product updates each day – it rolled Akeneo out across all of its clothing, accessories, gifts and homeware categories for AW22, as well as supporting its UK and German websites.

This has improved data quality, reducing errors and inconsistencies on the products listed on the website, whilst improving customer experience online.  Akeneo is now being adopted widely across White Stuff’s internal business units – from being able to pull data and reports quickly and easily from the PIM system to inform Merchandising, through to the Logistics team using PIM to land products from off-shore suppliers.