Contorion transformed a highly manual and fragmented product onboarding process into a scalable, automated product experience engine powered by Akeneo.
“Akeneo enabled us to shift our focus away from operational data management and toward creating a best-in-class customer experience.”
Contorion is an innovative and fast-growing online retailer specializing in professional industrial and trade supplies. Through a technology-driven business model, the company provides customers with a vast assortment of products while maintaining high service quality and competitive pricing.
Serving multiple international markets, Contorion manages an extremely large and complex catalog of industrial products. With nearly one million SKUs across approximately 1,000 product families, the company must deliver accurate, detailed, and localized product information to professional buyers across five countries and four languages. To support continued growth and deliver exceptional customer experiences, Contorion recognized the need for a scalable and modernized product information strategy.
“What once required more than 40 process steps and months of onboarding is now streamlined, automated, and scalable.”
As Contorion rapidly expanded its catalog and international presence, managing product content became increasingly difficult. The company’s onboarding process had evolved organically over time into a highly fragmented system involving more than 40 individual process steps across approximately 20 separate tools. The workflow combined manual tasks, partially automated systems, and disconnected workarounds that created inefficiencies throughout the organization.
The complexity of the catalog added another layer of difficulty. Industrial and trade supply products require highly detailed technical information, leading Contorion to manage approximately 2,500 product attributes across its catalog.
However, much of this information was stored as unstructured text rather than structured product attributes. While products appeared visually polished on the frontend, the underlying data lacked the structure necessary to support advanced customer-facing features such as filters, comparison tables, and intelligent search experiences.
The operational burden also created significant workforce challenges. Training new employees required more than six months due to the number of systems and workflows involved. Localization efforts across multiple countries and languages demanded extensive manual translation work, limiting the company’s flexibility to launch products and expand into new markets efficiently.
Perhaps most importantly, Contorion lacked clear visibility into the health and completeness of its product catalog. Without structured data and centralized governance, teams struggled to measure content quality, identify missing attributes, or understand whether product information aligned with customer expectations.
“By structuring and enriching our product data, we unlocked the ability to deliver better search, filtering, localization, and product discovery experiences for customers.”
To overcome these challenges, Contorion implemented Akeneo PIM and Akeneo Supplier Data Manager (SDM) to centralize and modernize its entire product information ecosystem. The initiative began with a large-scale transformation of the company’s core data structures, expanding from approximately 400 attributes to nearly 2,500 structured attributes capable of supporting scalable enrichment and advanced customer experiences.
The company undertook extensive data cleanup and migration efforts to support this transformation. More than 700,000 attribute values were transferred into the new structured framework, obsolete products were removed, and more than 5,000 product models were transformed and optimized within Akeneo. This created a strong, scalable foundation for future catalog growth.
Contorion also leveraged Akeneo’s AI-powered capabilities to automate key areas of content creation and localization. AI-driven rules were implemented to generate product names and descriptions, enabling unique SEO-friendly product content while eliminating approximately 10% of the manual onboarding effort previously required.
Additional AI-powered translation workflows allowed the company to scale localization efforts across all markets with virtually no incremental operational overhead.
To further streamline operations, Contorion rebuilt its internal imagery workflows and migrated product images into Akeneo. The implementation of Supplier Data Manager simplified and standardized the end-to-end supplier onboarding process, creating a far more efficient workflow from supplier submission to frontend publication.
Since implementing Akeneo, Contorion has achieved significant operational improvements while fundamentally changing how its teams approach product experiences. Product onboarding effort has already decreased by more than 30%, with additional efficiencies continuing to emerge as workflows mature and automation expands.
One of the most dramatic improvements has been employee onboarding and scalability. Training new team members, which previously required more than six months due to the complexity of the tool ecosystem, now takes less than one month. Teams only need to learn four core tools instead of navigating 20 disconnected systems, dramatically improving organizational agility and flexibility.
Localization has also been transformed. Through AI-powered translation workflows, Contorion eliminated the incremental effort previously required to launch products across multiple locales. What once demanded dedicated full-time localization resources can now be accomplished automatically, enabling faster expansion into new markets and accelerating product launches globally.
Internally, the transformation has elevated the role of the Product Experience team itself. Rather than functioning as reactive “data fixers,” the team now operates as strategic process architects focused on building automated workflows, refining data logic, and continuously improving the customer experience.
By replacing fragmented manual operations with a scalable digital foundation, Contorion successfully shifted from a data-centric organization to a truly customer-centric business capable of scaling a massive B2B catalog with confidence.
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