DANIELS Accelerates E-commerce Growth with AI-Driven Centric PIM and Centric DAM

We had no visibility of how many products were at what stage, where in the launch process, which ones were ready and where we had information missing.”

Finn Grande, Head of e-commerce at DANIELS describes the situation prior to implementing Centric PIM™ and Centric DAM™ “Managing the product range was overwhelming,” he says. At the time, the company’s PIM (Product Information Management) team had five employees just to keep up with the workload of getting products on the website. Furthermore, updating existing product data was very time-consuming. Grande gives an example. “We decided to change the spelling of ‘Kashmere’ to ‘Cashmere’ as it is more common. We had to manually go into every single product entry across the entire website to replace the ‘K’ with a ’C’ for each description that had the word ‘Cashmere’ in it.” Today, AI automation enables batch updates. Product content is transparent, accurate and all information is found in one system.

Curating exceptional fashion since 1967

Headquartered in Bornheim, Germany, Daniels & Co. – Herrenmoden GmbH is a retailer of high-quality men’s and women’s apparel. The company offers over 200 brands plus its own private-label products, which now make up 40% of the product offer. Known for exceptional customer service, DANIELS operates stores across Germany and, since 2020, has expanded its reach with an e-commerce site serving customers throughout Europe.

E-commerce at scale requires rich, structured data

With two collections per year, each containing about 3,200 color variants, DANIELS generates massive volumes of product data. Managing this manually was a major challenge.

Before Centric PIM and DAM, data collection was entirely manual. Products were examined, photographed and described, then manually entered into different spreadsheets. These lists were then consolidated into a master spreadsheet, then copied into the store system. Media and digital assets were stored on local servers and uploaded by hand, adding yet another layer of work.

Grande recalls, “Altogether, we had 450,000 records to manage annually. That includes roughly 6,400 color variants per year, representing around 30,000 SKUs, with about 70 data points per color. This had been the biggest challenge in recent years.” He notes, “It was a huge pain to collect and enter all the data in two locations. Spreadsheets have limited capabilities and we could not map business workflows or create value lists.”

A perfect case for an AI-powered PIM and DAM solution

DANIELS recognized the need for both a Product Information Management and Digital Asset Management solution to centralize product information and digital assets and AI to automate repetitive tasks and improve data quality by identifying inconsistencies across assortments. After an extensive search, the team narrowed the field down to three vendors, with Centric PIM and DAM ultimately getting the nod.

Grande explains, “Centric PIM and DAM cover all our needs, including the flexibility of adding modules. We especially value the flexible data model, which we configured to reflect our product structures. In our case, this meant organizing assortments across attributes, classes and products for consistency and efficiency. We also ran a test to ensure our existing workflows and product data model could be mapped in the system. That successful proof-of-concept sealed the deal.”

Grande goes on, “We were particularly impressed that we can set up Centric PIM and DAM ourselves and expand the solutions at a later date without the need for large developer resources or third parties.”

Flawless implementation under budget

From decision to go-live took just under nine months. Grande says, “The process went flawlessly, with very, very few issues. The implementation came in 30% under budget, which of course was a pleasant surprise.”

Meeting the goals of the product information management project

With Centric PIM and DAM, DANIELS achieved its key objectives:

• Collect product data more effectively
• Centralize, map and automate data workflows
• Gain full visibility of workload and products ready to sell
• Significantly improve product information quality and governance
• Streamline management of product ranges and attributes

In practical terms, Grande notes, “Centric PIM and Centric DAM streamline product data collection and shortens the go-to-market process, cutting the time it takes to get a product live on the website from three days to just over one.” Data collection is no longer the limiting factor in listing products on the website.

“We don’t have to enter product data into two locations—spreadsheets and the store system—anymore,” explains Grande. In addition, the data is structured with governance over product hierarchies, attributes, validations and relationships. “Attributes are now classified in groups, so we only see the information relevant to each product when we edit it, i.e., for a jacket, we don’t have to rummage through all the shoe attributes until we have found the right properties.” This saves time in locating and entering the information needed for each specific category. “It reduces the overall time from ‘goods receipt’ to online availability, down from seven or eight days to three or four days. That is about a 50% reduction.”