Boohoo Group – a leading fashion retailer– partnered with Akeneo, a company specialising in PXM and PIM, to improve operational efficiency and speed to market.
The retailer replaced its existing ERP system with Akeneo’s solutions as Boohoo’s teams previously had limited control over product data, very little data governance and no single source of truth when it came to product information.
According to the retailer, this was not only impacting the business operationally – with each new product taking 15-20 minutes to create on the old system and often causing duplicated efforts, with manual checking and correcting of the data needed at each stage of the product life cycle – but also negatively impacting customer experience (CX) on-site.
Missing or incorrect product information was making products harder to find for shoppers on the site, as they couldn’t be tagged or filtered during on-site search, but it also meant that Boohoo’s team weren’t getting the data feedback loop needed to adapt to evolving shopper trends and changing buying behaviour to optimise online experiences.
Having seen success implementing Akeneo Community Edition Product Information Management (PIM) solution at Pretty Little Thing, Akeneo was the obvious choice to roll-out PIM across the Group, as Boohoo sought to drive its strategy of creating one platform that its brands could plug into, across technology, systems and processes.
Akeneo’s solution unified Boohoo’s teams – from buying to visual merchandising to e-commerce, operations, finance and analytics – so everyone had access to a standard set of product information tools and a common set of systems to enrich product data.
Will Clayton, Head of Innovation at Boohoo, explained, “A big ethos of the business is ‘fast’ – fast in terms of spotting trends, developing new products and going to market. Using Akeneo PIM, we now have a single source of truth for all product data and that not only gives great speed, and more consistent and better-quality product information, but also affords us the flexibility across category and product type within our portfolio of brands. The other big benefit is scale; on a standard day, we can create 60,000 SKUs within Akeneo’s solution, but during peak periods, we’ve been able to scale this up to 300,000 in a single day.”
Steven Nolan, Technology Director at Boohoo Group, added, “We invested in PIM because we had (previously) nothing around mastering our products and were hamstrung by the manual processes that were in place. Akeneo was the best fit for our business and for the way that we wanted to adapt – it was the right fit, the right UX and the right feel for our business.”
The biggest benefits of Akeneo, as per Nolan, have been around speed and efficiency. “It would take them up to 10 minutes for our buy teams to raise a product and create a product in our old systems, whereas now that’s gone down to 30 seconds to be able to create a product, so we’re seeing huge efficiencies and huge savings for our business now,” stated Nolan.
Fred de Gombert, CEO of Akeneo, commented, “We’re delighted to see Boohoo evolve their operations and that they are seeing it deliver the pace and scale to meet their commerce growth objectives.”
It’s worth noting here that the Boohoo retail group is a portfolio of 13 market-leading fashion brands – from its own-brands including Boohoo, boohooMAN and Pretty Little Thing, to its recently acquired British heritage brands, BURTON menswear, DP.com (Dorothy Perkins) and Wallis – which has doubled the number of brands in its portfolio in the last two years.
