Leading Beauty Retailer Uses Product Information Management(PIM) Solution To Improve Data Quality

The client is the largest beauty retailer in the United States and the premier beauty destination for cosmetics, fragrance, skin, hair care products and salon services. Since opening its first store 25 years ago, the client has grown to become the top national retailer.

The company offers more than 20,000+ products from over 500+ well-established and emerging beauty brands across all categories and price points, including the client’s own pri- vate label. As of January 2016, the client operates 800+ retail stores across 40+ states and distributes its products online.

Data Landscape

The client prides itself on providing an exceptional customer experience and increasing customer loyalty. To those ends, they offer a very wide variety of brands and products, requiring over 300 vendors to stock. In addition, they market their products both in print and online. Keeping up the stock necessary to actualize their goal of becoming a “one stop shop” is, unsurprisingly, a data-intensive task.

The client vendors were providing product data in Excel spreadsheets, which then had to be manually reviewed and mapped by an employee. This product onboarding process was labor- intensive and increased the time it took products to become available. Additionally, product descriptions were vulnerable to inconsistencies when different people loaded them into different systems, for example into an ERP and an ecommerce application.