Apr 06, 2022
5 min to read
Discover the success story of Butlers Gmbh & Co (home24), european omnichannel retailer for home & living products, winner of the Unlock Accelerator Award 22.
Since last year, the Akeneo team has wanted to reward the organisations among its Community that have been able to move forward on their path toward being PXM Champions. But no two companies have the same exact needs and business growth goals. This is why we have our annual Akeneo Unlock PXM Champions Awards, recognizing true PXM Champions across 5 categories, each of them covering the main ways to Unlock growth thanks to well managed Product Experiences (Expansion, Accelerator, Global, Leadership, Experience Awards).
The Accelerator Award category aims at rewarding organisations that have been able to reach their goals faster than ever. That includes those organizations that have significantly reduced the time-to-market of their products, minimizing the number of steps involved, eliminating manual work, helping expand their product offering and / or launch new range of products thanks to their use of Akeneo PIM and/or Akeneo Onboarder, and realizing measurable results through the use of Akeneo PXM Studio.
This year, for this category, we received great submissions and had 3 Akeneo customers short-listed as finalists:
Congratulations to all the finalists! But only one can win…
This Accelerator Award needed Butlers*! *In reference to the recent 1st successful TV ad, Butlers launched for Spring with Home 24 in Germany “Dein Draußen braucht dich” (meaning “Your outdoor needs you”).
Butlers was acquired by Home 24 in December 2021 and the 2 companies perfectly complement each other, bringing to life a powerful omnichannel retailer for home & living products.
Together, the 2 brands have a complete omnichannel business that includes different countries, online and offline sales channels, franchise and B2B concepts, print and digital catalogues, and diverse product categories.
“The Butlers stores, in attractive city locations, multiply our personal contact opportunities with customers and increase our independence from online marketing. At the same time, we strengthen our respective online offerings.” Marc Appelhoff, CEO of Home24
Prior to leveraging Akeneo PXM Studio, the brand had integrated their self-developed PIM tool. However, the system had been too slow for years because many things had to be worked out manually.
For example, It often happened that more than five people entered the same kind of information in more than 8 places. This led to a very expensive and difficult process. In addition, this also led to many errors, poor data quality and lack of reliability.
This was obviously not scalable when you have ambitious growth plans.
Aware of that, and based on their fast growing expansion, Dr. Lasse Meißner, Head of BUTLERS-Digital and his team, were looking for a more flexible solution. They challenged over 20 different competitive solutions and finally found Akeneo to be the most suitable for their very complex omnichannel business.
Akeneo seemed to have a solution for everything and every question seemed to have been answered already in other projects with other customers.
6 weeks to refine processes and address the eCommerce website
Their biggest challenge was the scheduled project time of only six weeks. They kept drawing on the expertise of Akeneo in-house specialists and their partner Brandung to learn and make good decisions at an incredibly fast pace. They were able to use a lot of best practice examples from other projects for their own project to achieve the best result.
And it worked! They succeeded in implementing the SaaS version of Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition in less than six weeks! This involved four countries, five sales channels, 15 079 products, 351 attributes and just under one million data points.
This new reliable foundation initially enabled them to also relaunch their eCommerce system within another eight weeks after the implementation.
In addition, they were able to connect functions across departments and now are pursuing the same goals together.
The impact of all that speaks for itself: they more than doubled conversion rate online since they went live.
Duplicate data maintenance is reduced to one-fifth of what it used to be. The new work process has been aligned with Akeneo’s capabilities and is a perfect fit today.
Also, they have drastically reduced their error rate. With simpler and more transparent maintenance, fewer errors occur and, if they do, are corrected more quickly. This definitely impacts the product and customer experience and reduces return rates.
In conclusion, the creation and maintenance of product data has been simplified to such an extent that the team can maintain three times more data than before with the same resources and thus offer at least three times better service to their customers.
Such a concrete acceleration, Butlers definitely deserves this PXM Award and could have applied in the Leadership category too!
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