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Case Study: Smallable

How Smallable Enhances & Supports Over 1 Million Products With Akeneo

“We started as a very small company. 15 years later, we’ve grown to have over a million products and 130 employees, and our home-grown monolith system just couldn’t support it all. We needed a system that could easily respond to new business opportunities and map many products to many different entities, so that’s why we chose Akeneo.''

Asmaa Dakessian, Product Information Supervisor

The Challenge

Smallable encountered several pivotal challenges along its growth trajectory over the past 15 years:

Internal Inefficiencies

As Smallable underwent expansion over the years, the sheer magnitude of products in their catalog presented a formidable challenge. Consequently, it became increasingly complex to manage all aspects of service and product-related functions under a single department. The volume of products made it nearly impossible to ensure consistency, precision, and timely updates.

No Central Source of Truth

Before adopting Akeneo PIM, Smallable managed its product information through a home-grown solution. This fragmented approach lacked a centralized, standardized system for storing, updating, and disseminating product data to both internal and external teams. Consequently, this approach adversely affected their eCommerce platform, resulting in subpar user experiences and low-quality product recommendations. Without consistent, upto-date product descriptions, images, and pricing across various parts of their website, customers faced confusion and weren’t able to make confident, informed purchase decisions.

Rigid, Unscalable Technology

Smallable harbored ambitious expansion plans that included transforming into a global organization. However, their existing technological infrastructure struggled to meet the demands of content translation and localization, prerequisites for international expansion. The inflexibility of their monolithic setup impeded the adaptation of their content for different languages and markets, hindering their global ambitions.

Our monolithic system made it very difficult to link different products together and manage the ownership of different products. It’s easier in Akeneo to not only link our products to different brands, designers, collections, or colors, but also creates more connections between teams so that we can work together better. Akeneo makes it easy to implement new information that improves the user experience quickly.

Asmaa Dakessian, Product Information Supervisor

The Solution

Improved Internal Efficiencies & Streamlined Product Management

Akeneo provided Smallable with the tools to streamline product management. Various teams, including product information, purchasing, product management, technology, and logistics, could now collaborate seamlessly via a centralized platform for product data. Akeneo simplified user permissions management, facilitating the incorporation of new team members and enhancing internal cooperation. This efficiency enhancement allowed Smallable to maintain its team size even as its product catalog expanded, resulting in heightened internal efficiencies and a streamlined workflow.

Enhanced Content Enrichment 

Akeneo empowered Smallable to enrich product content effectively through automatic attribute creation, encompassing details such as color, images, compositions, categories, and dimensions. This newfound capability enabled Smallable to craft compelling product narratives, elevating the overall customer experience. As a result, they saw a reduction in production times, enabling quicker product launches, and a decrease in returns as customers had a clearer understanding of the products they were purchasing.

Seamless Integration

Akeneo’s composable architecture meant that integration with Smallable’s tech stack, including DAM, ElasticSearch, and Algolia, was simple and straightforward. This ensured a consistent, efficient flow of data across all systems, while also offering the flexibility to integrate future technologies as the company continued to expand. This streamlined technology integration improved overall efficiency and resulted in an accelerated time-to-market for their products.

Every day, we are publishing between 50 and 500 products to our site. It’s a huge catalog. With Akeneo, our time-to-market for most products is less than two days - if we get the product on Monday, we can publish it by Thursday.

Asmaa Dakessian, Product Information Supervisor

The Result

Akeneo’s composable technology enabled Smallable to:

  • Streamline product information management across millions of SKUs, expand their product catalog offering without investing in a larger team.
  • Automatically create product attributes to enrich the customer experience and reduce return rates. 
  • Improve production times and time-to-market due to improved team communication, publishing anywhere from 50 to 500 products a day. 
  • Integrate and communicate seamlessly with Smallable’s existing technology stack.

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