Akeneo Honors PXM Champions at Unlock 2022

BOSTON, March 29, 2022 – Akeneo, the global leader in Product Experience Management (PXM) solutions, announced today the winners of the Akeneo Unlock 2022 PXM Champions Awards. Hailed as one of the industry’s greatest recognitions, the awards honor brands that excel in using PXM best practices to drive accelerated growth, deliver outstanding product experiences, and turn challenges into opportunities as they adapt to the evolving omnichannel environment.

The winners were honored at Unlock 2022, Akeneo’s flagship global summit for the Product Information Management (PIM) and PXM community, which was held on March 15th-16th in Paris. Each recipient has demonstrated extraordinary creativity, outstanding skills, and unparalleled commerce expertise in utilizing one or more of Akeneo’s PXM Studio solutions. 

“Consumers and business buyers demand more from brands and retailers. The new baseline is a consistent product experience across all touchpoints, which is hard enough. The differentiator is showcasing brand values, integrating environmental impact information, or highlighting second-hand collections,” says Kristin Naragon, Akeneo’s VP of Global Marketing and Strategy. “That’s why we’re so thrilled to celebrate this year’s PXM Champions. During a transformative moment for our industry, these brands have stepped up and used product experiences to take their businesses to the next level, while continuing to drive value for their customers.” 

The five award winners for this year are:

Accelerator Award

Butlers GmbH & Co.KG, the leading European retailer for home and living products, received the Accelerator Award in recognition of a successful transition from its homegrown legacy PIM solution Akeneo PIM in just six weeks, encompassing four countries, five sales channels, 15,079 products, 351 unique attributes, and just under one million data points. Working in partnership with Brandung, Butlers was able to relaunch a more powerful version of its eCommerce system in just eight weeks after implementing Akeneo PIM. With its new PIM, Butlers is able to maintain three times more data using the same amount of resources, allowing teams to double online conversion rates while reducing duplicate data maintenance and error rates companywide.

Expansion Award

Babolat, the world’s oldest racquet sports company, received the Expansion Award for its ambitious rollout of a D2C growth strategy after over a century of selling tennis racquets and equipment through a B2B model. Through Akeneo’s centralized product information management platform, Babolat was able to decrease time to market for new products, enabling the company to offer reliable, high-quality

product information translated into eight languages from the launch of its showcase site in Europe and Japan. At the same time, the centralized product information allowed teams to streamline product data enrichment to satisfy both a B2B audience of distributors, retailers, coaches, and clubs as well as their new direct-to-customer audience of tennis players.

Global Award

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), the automotive manufacturer redefining the future of modern luxury vehicles, won the Global Award after a successful migration of more than one million SKUs into Akeneo’s centralized PIM platform allowed JLR teams worldwide to more effectively sell to a global audience. Led by iWeb solutions architect Heddwyn Coombs, JLR leveraged Akeneo to increase speed to market for new products and collections across new territories, supporting a worldwide footprint of 39,000 employees across 195 countries, 28 languages, and 32 international websites. The speed and flexibility of Akeneo’s PIM empowered local teams to drive massive growth in 2021, increasing holiday sales for Jaguar by 174% and Land Rover by 218%.

Leadership Award

Azelis, the leading innovation service provider in the specialty chemicals and food ingredients industry, took home the Leadership Award for its efforts in driving an industry-leading digital transformation from traditional sales channels to online product experiences. Working closely with Smile, Azelis was able to leverage Akeneo PIM to centralize a product catalog of more than 100,000 base products with unique marketing, regulatory, and operational requirements needed to serve 58 countries while still providing unique product enrichment on a local level. In just three months since implementing Akeneo PIM, Azelis experienced a 50% efficiency gain in processing product creation while simultaneously reducing errors by 50% thanks to Akeneo’s automation, validation rules, and workflows.

Experience Award

JPW Industries, the leading designer, manufacturer, and value-added distributor of machinery, specialty shop tools, and equipment for rugged applications, took home the Experience Award for facing an extremely diversified group of customers, selling to industrial, consumer, and construction markets across distributor, eCommerce, and field channels. With six unique brands under its umbrella, JPW worked closely with Bounteous to utilize Akeneo’s PIM, helping improve targeted brand experiences across all channels. Through Akeneo’s governance capabilities, JPW has been able to onboard more brands into the organization than expected, helping multiply and accelerate their growth curve and setting the company up for long-term, sustainable growth.

Revalize, a worldwide leader in sector-specific revenue operations software for manufacturers, distributors, and specifiers, was awarded the Experience Award for its unique use of Akeneo PIM to reflect the companies’ respective brand values across multiple geographies. Revalize, being in the unique position of being a company that deals in data instead of physical products, sought a solution as flexible as its homegrown system without the need to leverage its in-house engineering team to create and maintain it. Working in tandem with its partners at Sitation, the company saw an immediate increase in Productivity Efficiency Quality (PEQ) after implementation, and the number of product updates the team can complete in a given time frame has remained well above previous levels since, while cost per SKU has gone down significantly across products.

To learn more about Akeneo and for more information on the company’s next summit taking place in Fall 2022 in Boston.