Bringing Color to Rainbow Shops’ Product Experience Strategy

When it comes to having large product catalogs, prominent clothing retailer Rainbow Shops is no stranger. With over a thousand brick-and-mortar locations and a bustling online presence offering thousands of SKUs, Rainbow Shops offers clothing for men, women, and children across the globe.

At a recent PXM Client Club, we had the chance to sit down with the tech lead of the Rainbow Shops team, Ben Smith. He described the scope of their operation as, "We have about 56,000 SKUs online on sale today, but that's actually a low number as that's at the end of our Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. Our average SKU size tends to sit around 66,000." 

That’s a lot of products to manage across a lot of touchpoints; a product catalog of this size requires an advanced system that can effectively manage massive loads of product information. Before Akeneo, Rainbow Shops was using a homegrown PIM solution, but the scale of their catalog simply outgrew their internal solution.

In particular, Rainbow Shops faced two key challenges:

1. Product volume management: Rainbow Shops needed to manage a high volume of products efficiently, ensuring that each product's information was accurate and up-to-date, a process that was, before Akeneo, cumbersome and prone to errors.
2. Multi-channel consistency: Beyond their eCommerce platform, Rainbow Shops integrates product information into various downstream systems, including recommendation engines and social commerce platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Google Merchant Center. Each one of these channels requires consistent, reliable product information.

We sell a lot online by volume, just at sheer scale. That means we have to have merchandisers and people that work within our PIM system to make sure that we get all this information out in front of the public as quickly as possible in a way that’s presentable and readable.

Ben Smith eCommerce Tech Lead

Rainbow Shops

The adoption of Akeneo’s Product Information Management PIM system allowed Rainbow Shops to automate critical processes and significantly boost efficiency, allowing Ben and his team to focus on enhancing the customer shopping experience. 

One of the key features that Ben credits for improving their operations is Akeneo’s rules engine tool, which allows for the automation of mundane tasks, such as categorization and pricing adjustments, both of which are vital for keeping the online store competitive and up-to-date with current market trends.

Initially, Rainbow Shops started with automating the most critical and repetitive tasks. Ben and his team focused on setting up rules that would categorize products automatically based on predefined attributes. Over time, as the team recognized the benefits, they expanded the rules engine to cover more complex scenarios, eventually setting up around 30 rules that oversee the automation of core attributes necessary for accurate product categorization in their Shopify platform.

So not only did the PIM system simplify internal operations, but it also enabled quick scalability across multiple channels, which is essential for a retailer with as broad and varied of an audience as Rainbow Shop’s.

Ben described the impact of Akeneo by saying, "When the rules engine came out, it was a godsend to us when it came to optimizing that product information management process. It's not been that tricky for me or the team to manage in the end once Akeneo came on board." 

The merchandising team at Rainbow Shops, supported by a dedicated photo lab and a social photography team, also works seamlessly within the Akeneo PIM. Products are rapidly enriched with detailed attributes—of which Rainbow Shops tracks 137 across various families—allowing them to move from photo shoots to being available online in a streamlined process.

The integration of AI and automation into the Akeneo PIM has also brought about remarkable efficiencies for Rainbow Shops, allowing their team to categorize thousands of pieces of product information very quickly, and improve their time-to-market when it comes to launching new products or updating existing ones. 

Overall, Rainbow Shops’ adoption of Akeneo demonstrates the power of embracing the right technology at the right time. Being able to efficiently manage a vast and ever-changing product catalog is no easy job, but by integrating Akeneo technology into their processes, Rainbow Shops was able to streamline their internal operations and create a strong foundation for compelling product experiences wherever they sell.

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Samira McDonald, Senior Manager, Community

Akeneo