Achieved a 50% reduction in time-to-market, enabling product exports to European marketplaces in under 10 days.
Today, we guarantee our customers that new collections will be exported to European marketplaces in under 10 days. The back-and-forth communication with brand teams has been reduced by half thanks to the intuitive SDM interface
The Agent is a digital platform working with fashion brands such as Les Tropéziennes, Aigle, Le Coq Sportif, Pain de Sucre, and Nat & Nin, operating across 28 countries in Europe. They manage catalogs, content quality, publication timelines, merchandising consistency, and performance optimization on marketplaces like Zalando, About You, Amazon, La Redoute, and Decathlon. As a fashion-forward company, The Agent needed to ensure brands could meet marketplace requirements while accelerating time-to-market.
Fashion is an industry driven by speed, where trends shift rapidly, and seasons last just six months. Getting products to market quickly is essential, yet The Agent faced significant hurdles in managing product data across different brands, formats, and marketplace requirements.
Each marketplace has its own unique product classification system, making it difficult to standardize product data across brands. Enriching product sheets with accurate attributes was essential for better discoverability, improved conversion rates, and reduced return rates.
Today’s distributors are more selective and customer-centric than ever, demanding high-quality, enriched content and threatening to delist brands that fail to meet these standards. Meanwhile, consumers expect rich, detailed product descriptions—without them, they move on quickly. As AI tools like ChatGPT and other LLMs increasingly power product search and digital assistants, high-quality product data isn’t just important—it’s a competitive differentiator. Enriched content helps ensure products appear in AI-driven searches, boosting visibility, driving engagement, and ultimately increasing sales.
The Agent was dealing with:
The solution? A more automated, structured approach to data onboarding that could support The Agent’s need for scale and efficiency.
Recognizing the need for efficiency, The Agent adopted Akeneo’s SDM to streamline operations and enhance collaboration with brand partners. This strategic shift empowered them to reduce manual back-and-forth communication with brand partners, allowing for direct catalog imports and automated normalization. The platform’s AI-driven algorithms efficiently handled classification errors, ensuring seamless product mapping across multiple marketplaces.
By leveraging SDM’s automation, The Agent eliminated redundant manual work, enabling its teams to focus on high-value activities. On average, they became twice as fast as before.
This improved speed facilitated the multiplication of references put online each season, significantly contributing to increased performance for brands and having a substantial impact on business growth. Over the last two years, The Agent has seen a 2.5x increase in online product references.
Reducing the time between catalog availability and sales proved to be a major competitive advantage. The more brands invested in high-quality data, the greater their revenue and margins, proving that structured product data is a key driver for marketplace success.
The Agent used to take the bulk of the cleansing and enrichment process internally for themselves. The growing number of marketplaces, the increase in the number of attributes they had to enrich, the growing demand from end-consumer for tailored, personalized, branded content made it hard for the team to cope with the volumes and be relevant.
SDM enabled The Agent to invite its brands to their dedicated web portal, empowering them to adapt their content effectively across the appropriate channels. The ease of use of the self-service Supplier Access allowed them to access guidelines, best practices, templates and then easily upload their catalogs on the portal.
AI-automation ensured the bulk of the enrichment, classification and correction work was done for the brands who could go into validation mode for most, and dedicate time to manually update the most important data points.
Returns on online fashion sales is a traditional margin killer for brands, with online return rates on fashion marketplaces averaging 60%. Thanks to the enrichment process provided by The Agent’s team and the brands work, empowered by the AI-automated Extraction module of the SDM platform, The Agent managed to decrease returns by 11 points on average, resulting in subsequent margin improvement for them and their customers.
SDM has revolutionized our internal process by cutting our time-to-market in half. Our partners use the SDM platform directly to import their catalogs, where AI normalizes, standardizes, and classifies products automatically.
Accelerated Time-to-Market & Business Growth
Through its strategic adoption of SDM, The Agent transformed its marketplace operations, improving efficiency and accuracy in product data management. By automating key processes, reducing manual workload, and enhancing collaboration with brand partners, The Agent successfully streamlined product launches, optimized marketplace listings, and elevated the overall customer experience, reinforcing its position as a leader in digital fashion expansion.
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