How Reitmans Canada Ltd. transitioned from manual operation into a scalable foundation for omnichannel growth.
“RCL’s goal in adopting Akeneo was to establish a single source of truth for product data, standardize and automate enrichment workflows, improve data quality, and enable a scalable, future-ready foundation to support its broader digital transformation and customer experience strategy.”
Founded by Herman and Sarah Reitman in Montreal in 1926, Reitmans Canada Ltd (RCL) is a leading Canadian omnichannel fashion retailer operating three distinct apparel brands: Reitmans, RW&CO, and PENN. Penningtons. Together, these brands serve women and men across Canada through close to 400 physical retail locations and dedicated e-commerce storefronts, offering inclusive, on-trend apparel across a broad range of sizes, styles, and price points.
The company invests heavily in product storytelling, rich content, and omnichannel consistency to ensure customers receive accurate, compelling, and localized product information across all digital commerce touchpoints. As part of its broader digital transformation roadmap, RCL is focused on improving speed to market, operational efficiency, and customer experience through modern platforms and automation, while preserving each brand’s unique identity and voice.
“By establishing Akeneo as a single, AI-augmented source of truth that governs product data, content, translations, and assets across three brands and activates seamlessly to Shopify, RCL transformed a fragmented, manual operation into a scalable foundation for omnichannel growth.”
With their new digital commerce strategy and digital transformation roadmap, RCL struggled to manage product information across a combination of legacy systems, internally developed tools, and spreadsheets. Product data, copy, translations, and digital assets were fragmented, with multiple teams manually maintaining content in Excel and Google Sheets, leading to inconsistent workflows, limited governance, and slow time to market.
By operating in this way, when the business began to scale across their three brands, these manual processes made it increasingly difficult to maintain data quality, enforce brand standards, and efficiently syndicate product information to eCommerce platforms. This operational inefficiency and inability for RCL to support its omnichannel growth strategy was directly caused by this lack of a centralized, governed source of product truth.
RCL’s goal became clear. They needed to establish a single source of truth for product data, standardize and automate enrichment workflows, improve data quality, and enable a scalable, future-ready foundation to support its broader digital transformation and customer experience strategy.
RCL implemented Akeneo PIM as a centralized, governed single source of truth for product data across its three brands. Replacing fragmented legacy systems and spreadsheet-driven processes with a software they can word directly out of, connected to all of their ecommerce channels. Product and content data from RCL’s existing systems (including FLEX and eCMS) were consolidated into Akeneo, where structured enrichment workflows, business rules, and validation logic were established. This enabled the merchandising, copywriting, digital, and brand teams to collaborate within a single location, while maintaining clear ownership, governance, and brand-specific controls.
Akeneo AI capabilities embedded directly in the Akeneo user interface were used to assist with product content generation and translations, eliminating manual, spreadsheet-based workflows and enabling faster, more consistent localization across brands.
Finally, RCL leveraged Akeneo’s managed Shopify connector from the Akeneo App Store to reliably activate product data to three distinct Shopify storefronts. This approach avoided custom integrations, accelerated time to value, and ensured that all brands could scale on a shared foundation while preserving unique brand experiences.
By establishing Akeneo as a single, AI-augmented source of truth that governs product data, content, translations, and assets across three brands and activates seamlessly to Shopify, RCL transformed a fragmented, manual operation into a scalable foundation for omnichannel growth.
RCL saw a transformational improvement in their speed to market for digital products, due to Akeneo PIM centralisation capabilities. Structured workflows, business rules, and AI-assisted content creation and translations allow teams to work in parallel, significantly reducing manual handoffs and delays. What was once a fragmented spreadsheet, forcing disconnected teams to complete manual tasks, now enables teams to work in governed workflows, accelerating readiness for Shopify activation.
With Akeneo live and integrated to Shopify, RCL now has a scalable platform that supports additional channels, brands, and Phase 2 initiatives without reintroducing manual processes or custom integrations.
How Reitmans Canada Ltd. transitioned from manual operation into a scalable foundation for omnichannel growth.
Our Akeneo Experts are here to answer all the questions you might have about our products and help you to move forward on your PXM journey.
Summer Release
