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How Staples Upgraded its Business Strategy and Employee Satisfaction with Akeneo PIM
The enterprise way of working started to change and the way our customers shopped changed too. We needed to be there. Our smaller competitors had webshops consumers were visiting. We realized we were behind in that area and needed to be able to directly deliver our product to end-consumers instead of via their company.
As a world renowned brand, Staples is the go-to office retailer for businesses of all sizes, offering products and services designed to support working and learning. Part of the global family, Staples Benelux oversees the brand in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Luxembourg. From printers to office furniture to technology and more, Staples is a one-stop-shop for corporate headquarters and home offices alike.
Though Staples has always served small businesses and consumers through its open webshop platforms, for decades, the brand’s major focus was on providing office essentials for major enterprises. Typically, just one office or department manager would be responsible for ordering products for the whole team, using the Staples catalog to find exactly what they needed.
However, when COVID-19 hit, office life changed drastically … and so did office consumer buying habits. As more people began to work from home, it became normal for employees to receive a home office stipend, encouraging them to individually search for and purchase their own office needs. To keep up with the shifting landscape, Staples had to adapt and strengthen their B2C processes. This meant prioritizing websites over catalogs, providing a searchable, streamlined experience for consumers navigating a new world of home office shopping.
But as Staples focused on enriching their product data for a new audience, they faced additional challenges. For example, the company works with a wide variety of distributors and wholesalers, each with their own product attribute standards and preferred languages. What’s more, content for the brand’s 55,000 SKUs was managed by just a team of two.
If this shift was going to be at all possible, Staples Benelux knew a PIM was a must.
This is her first real office job, and the fact that after two months, she knows what she s doing and that two people can manage such a large catalog of products is the strength of Akeneo and why I’d recommend it to everyone.
With distributed partners and wholesalers, a small team, and thousands of products, Staples needed a PIM that was, above all, easy to use and quick to implement. Akeneo’s intuitive interface and dashboards that provide insights at a glance made it the perfect solution for Staples’ needs.
After quickly getting up to speed on the Akeneo platform, the team immediately began using Akeneo PIM to bring all of their content up-to-date. The dashboard system and Completeness Score made it easy to share progress updates with the rest of the company and track improvement in real time – incredibly important during a major strategy shift. What’s more, the easy imports and customization features Akeneo PIM offers meant Staples could work efficiently without sacrificing data consistency and accuracy while collaborating with multiple suppliers, partners, and wholesalers.
There were 25,000 products in our catalog - right now we have over 50,000. That means in a year, we've managed to double our catalog and the goal for this year is to quadruple it.
Bulk actions allow for faster updates and improve searchability
Updating product data requirements to meet a new B2C focus for over 55,000 SKUs would typically take ages. However, with Akeneo PIM, the Staples Benelux team was able to use bulk actions to fix data errors, update attributes, and improve content readability without falling behind. Plus, as the brand adapts to compete on major search platforms, bulk actions allow for quick keyword optimization. The team is now able to easily update thousands of products to include the keywords consumers are using to find the office products they need. This has played a major role in keeping up with both the changing workplace landscape and the competition.
Easier collaboration means more consistent product data
Staples works with wholesale partners and suppliers across several different countries, each with their own standards for product information and preferred language. With easy imports and customizable field mapping, Akeneo PIM has helped spur better collaboration between Staples and its partners while also making sure information is consistent and accurate. As a result, the brand has significantly improved their overall partner relationships.
More products able to be managed in less time without increasing team size
As Staples grew from 25,000 products to over 50,000, with a goal of quadrupling that number by the end of the year, the brand knew managing all of that product data would be a herculean task for a team of two. But with Akeneo PIM, the team has quickly managed to update product content, adapt to a new business strategy, and manage wholesaler partnerships without needing to invest more resources. Plus, Akeneo PIM also allowed for automated content creation workflows with wholesale partners and supplies, freeing up more time for the small but mighty team to focus on high-value tasks.
A special thanks to our partners who supported this project:
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