How PXM Champions are Utilizing Akeneo to Expand Faster In 2025

Each year, the Akeneo Expansion Award honors visionary customers leveraging Akeneo Product Cloud to fuel remarkable growth and transformation. The 2025 recipients, including Sealed Air Corporation, FELCO, and Digital Factory InVivo, are no exception. These leading brands show how a strategic approach to Product Information Management (PIM solves many existing data management problems and can unlock global markets and unparalleled efficiency. New channels, fresh audiences, and complex challenges become opportunities when product data is put to work.

Despite operating in diverse industries, these companies faced remarkably similar hurdles before implementing Akeneo. But today, they offer valuable insights for any business looking to turn product data into real growth.

Growing Pains: The Pre-Akeneo Struggle

Before Akeneo, our award winners were stuck with product data systems that just couldn’t keep up with their ambitions. Their biggest hurdles included:

• Inefficient manual processes: Managing extensive product portfolios relied heavily on manual methods and spreadsheets, making processes time-consuming as the companies scaled. Launching a new product could take a month - not exactly agile.
  
• Siloed and inconsistent data: Data was often managed in separate systems, leading to siloed information and difficulty providing consistent product information across channels. Importing data from disparate sources led to unreliable product data.
  
• Limited accessibility and collaboration: Existing systems just didn’t cut it—teams struggled to access or update product info quickly, and manual data sharing made it tough to keep channel partners in the loop, let alone support them efficiently. Dependence on technical teams for data management and integration slowed things down and left little room for business users to take the lead.
  
• Difficulty scaling and expanding: Outdated legacy systems lacked the flexibility needed for modern eCommerce. Expanding globally was difficult, customizing content for different channels was slow, and keeping up with new regulations just piled on more complexity.
• Risk of losing institutional knowledge: For companies like Sealed Air, key product knowledge lived in the heads of seasoned team members. Without a system to capture it, that expertise was at risk of being erased.

These challenges stood in the way of global growth and kept brands from delivering the consistent customer experience today’s shoppers expect.

The Power of Akeneo’s Product Cloud

Akeneo Product Cloud gave these companies the springboard they needed to turn growing pains into growth wins! And while each brand’s journey was unique, several common themes emerged in how they leveraged Akeneo, including:

1. Creating a single source of truth: The first major win? Bringing scattered product data together to create a single, centralized product data repository. This shift eliminated the need for manual spreadsheets and ensured data reliability and consistency across all channels. As Digital Factory InVivo noted, Akeneo made managing their large, complex catalog a whole lot simpler by providing them “with a centralized and structured platform”.
   
2. Automation in action: All three winners leveraged automation to improve their workflows significantly. FELCO cut product launch time from one month to just 24 hours by automating publishing, and Digital Factory InVivo sped up catalog integration and updates, reducing ticket processing time from over a day to just a few hours. In fact, Digital Factory InVivo saw efficiency gains overall equal to 1.5 full-time employees in just three weeks.Thanks to Akeneo’s rule-based automation and smart features, AI-driven product descriptions streamlined processes and freed up valuable resources for all of our PXM Champions.
   
3. Seamless integration and data syndication: Akeneo’s composable infrastructure also played a key role in these transformations, making it easy to plug into the rest of the tech stack via APIs. The winners connected Akeneo with everything from ERP systems to DAM tools like Cloudinary, ETL tools like Kiboko, and eCommerce platforms like Shopify. This enabled smooth data sync, streamlined syndication, and stronger collaboration with channel partners. FELCO even retired its legacy GS1 system by managing compliant data directly in Akeneo using reference entities - a major win for both efficiency and flexibility.
4. Enabling global reach with multilingual capabilities: For brands expanding across borders, Akeneo’s multilingual and localization data capabilities made a big difference. FELCO tapped into native genAI tools to translate product descriptions with local relevance, and scaled from 10 to 170 markets in under six months, while new product launches across the board accelerated from months to just days or hours. Digital Factory InVivo tailored catalogs and enriched content to meet customer expectations and stay compliant with country-specific regulations.
5. Empowering teams with improved data quality: Akeneo gave business teams the reins with a structure that’s built for autonomy, not bottlenecks. With robust control and validation tools, teams could manage product data confidently, leading to stronger consistency, better SEO, and cleaner content all around. Digital Factory InVivo saw a significant expansion in attribute management after adopting Akeneo, growing from 40 to 650 attributes, while FELCO’s channel partners gained easier access to enriched product data, strengthening relationships and boosting sales effectiveness.
6. Transforming for the future: With the right strategy and the right technology in place, these PXM Champions are setting themselves up for long-term success. Sealed Air used AI to preserve decades of product knowledge, while FELCO enabled the online sale of spare parts and Digital Factory InVivo launched new eCommerce platforms and digitized partner catalogs, creating an omnichannel platform that connects their entire value chain.