PIM in the fashion industry: 5 ways to accelerate your product strategy

For you, a seasoned marketing or digital expert in the fashion industry, there’s no doubt about it: the relationship between your collections and your customers is, above all, a love story. And as in any love story, one of the (most) important things is communication!

Product descriptions, photos, lookbooks—everything must be comprehensive and carefully crafted so that simply reading your product information is enough to win over your customers. Every collection, every item, must be showcased to its best advantage for that day when a potential customer comes to visit your site.

This is the essential prerequisite for:

• Love lasts: with your information always complete and your photos true to life, there’s no chance your customer will be disappointed – they won’t return their purchase
• Trust to flourish: you project a positive image of your brand and your customers recommend you

But the circumstances surrounding this encounter – this love at first sight between your customers and your products, facilitated by your product details – aren’t always straightforward. Sometimes you have so much to say that organising it isn’t always easy… especially when collections follow one another in quick succession and customers expect to find them on both your website and their favourite marketplace…

The good news for you is that we’ve got five ways to make this love story unforgettable. The essential prerequisite, above all else: make sure you have a PIM (Product Information Management) system. Why? The answer lies in these five points.

1. Ensure your product listings are accurate

You’re aiming for flawless communication: product information sometimes comes from different sources that don’t always communicate with one another (ERP, media server, files). However, for you, there can be no product listings without images, no images without descriptions, and no descriptions without SEO optimisation. And, of course, data on stock availability and prices must be impeccably up to date.

A PIM (Product Information Management) solution allows you to centralise all your product data, regardless of its source. All your data is brought together in a single space, at the heart of the PIM; this is the starting point from which it can be enriched and refined by various contributors.

PIM enables you to manage your product information effectively:

• You can monitor the completeness of each of your product listings on the dashboard before approving them
• You manage image rights and annotate the names of the models wearing each product. You then receive an alert before the information expires.

2. Cope with changes in your business’s pace with confidence

You’re aiming for flexibility: Seasons come and go, trends evolve, and your brand must therefore be as flexible as it is creative. It’s a major challenge: entering new information, adding photographs and SEO descriptions—all of which tie up your teams and can cause delays in publication. You therefore want to streamline this cycle of constant renewal.

Using the PIM, you can easily manage your workflows throughout the operational stages:

• You organise your product hierarchy according to your themes: you link and group your products to create looks, collections and themes
• Based on your looks, you can determine your cross-selling and up-selling opportunities with a single click
• The PIM is simple and intuitive for every contributor and role, saving you time
• You make collaboration second nature. The ticketing and notification system, which connects all contributors, boosts team productivity, even when working remotely

Is the season over? Archive the collection with a single click and showcase your new range.

3. Get your products to market as quickly as possible

You’re aiming for responsiveness: before any product goes on sale, your product information is not only complete but also highly appealing. From the photographer, ensuring flawless visuals, to the SEO manager, ensuring optimised content, this takes time. To avoid losing sales because a product hasn’t been launched, minimise the gap between when your product arrives in stock and when you can announce its release. This is optimising your time-to-market.

Sales and Marketing teams have resolved this issue with the introduction of CRM, which has streamlined customer management and engagement to generate greater profits. Now, with PIM, this applies to product data management: Centralisation + Efficiency + Automation = Time savings.

Fashion brands using PIM today simply describe it as a revolution in their working methods. They have significantly reduced their time-to-market. Jennyfer, for example, reports a reduction from nearly two weeks without PIM to 24 hours with Quable PIM.

Reducing time-to-market has a real impact on your turnover, an impact to which PIM contributes:

• You define each person’s roles to establish a seamless content enrichment process
• You speed up media enrichment, a process known for being time-consuming and prone to errors. Quable PIM provides an application that generates a barcode based on the product’s EAN. Using a barcode scanner, your photographer scans each sample to directly upload the photographs associated with the correct product into your PIM.
• You automate product information updates made in the PIM via data feeds to your e-commerce site or other channels

4. Boost your e-commerce performance

You’re aiming for optimised product listings: the temptation to get products online quickly can sometimes come at the expense of the quality of the product listing content. Customer reviews, high-definition photographs with built-in zoom, technical details, storytelling and marketing copy showcase your product in a listing that truly makes people want to buy. Your aim is to provide your customers with everything they need to take the plunge.

An extremely comprehensive, reliable and high-quality product description is, in fact, the key to improving your e-commerce conversion rates. This is particularly true given that one-third of consumers have abandoned an online purchase due to a lack of product description (Shotfarm study, Product Information Report).

And shortcomings in product information can have longer-term consequences that undermine your profitability. We’re talking here about customer returns, estimated at 25 per cent for the fashion sector – the highest rate across all sectors. Your profitability is therefore sometimes distorted by a simple error in the product description: indeed, this is highlighted by 42 per cent of consumers (Shotfarm Study, Product Information Report).

This brings us back to the absolute necessity to appeal and captivate, which is what drives your clothing. How could you even think of going on a romantic date without a brand-new dress or a brand-new three-piece suit?

Showcase your products for their ‘date of a lifetime’ with the online shopper; adorn them with your finest embellishments; make them shine like a million stars so that the relationship lasts in the long term.

Managing product information via the PIM emphasises the essentials of e-commerce communication:

• You give them visibility by populating and centralising SEO attributes (titles, descriptions, keywords) at the heart of the solution
• You populate the most specific fields for your products to meet customers’ need for transparency (materials, origin, labels, etc.)

5. Aim for an international omnichannel approach

You’re aiming for omnipresence: Consumers in 2018 are savvy and fickle. They browse on their mobiles, on their office computers or on tablets from their living rooms. They receive catalogues, spot items in-store, buy online immediately or wait for seasonal promotions. Your aim is to support them from start to finish throughout their purchasing journey across all these channels, with the right message at the right time, whilst personalising your communication.

PIM is the foundation you’re looking for. It unifies your product data, saves you time, boosts your turnover, and means you’re now ready to take the leap into omnichannel retailing.

Using the PIM:

• You can distribute your product information across all fashion marketplaces – both those you’re already on and those you aren’t (yet) on
• You can generate web or print catalogues and stylish PDF lookbooks in just a few clicks, and distribute them in-store or to your retailers and suppliers
• You give your business an international boost by launching your products into new, high-potential markets, thanks to the translation of your product listings directly within the PIM into 50 languages

Distribute, automate, sell.

These five steps are essential for building a love affair between your products and consumers, and have a direct impact on:

• Your operational productivity
• Your time savings (time to market, accelerating your market expansion strategy)
• Your competitive advantage
• Improved e-commerce and omnichannel performance
• Your business growth.

Conclusion

The fashion industry is turning to PIM to consolidate vast amounts of product data that is regularly updated. The solution adapts to changing workloads, enabling products to be brought to market quickly whilst improving the quality of information provided to online shoppers. These are the drivers of strong growth in a highly competitive sector.