PIM in fashion: 5 ways to accelerate your product strategy

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

Descriptions, photos, lookbooks, everything must be complete and well thought out so that just reading your product information is enough to seduce your customers. Each collection, each piece, must be sublimated for the day when a beautiful Internet user comes to visit them.

This is the sine qua non for :

• Love lasts: with your information always complete and your photos accurate, there is no chance that your customer will be disappointed: they will not return their purchase
• There is trust: you convey a positive image of your brand and your customers recommend you

But the circumstances of this meeting, of this love at first sight between your customers and your products through your information, are not always simple. You sometimes have so much to say that it is not always easy to organise it... especially when the collections follow one another in quick succession and the customers expect to find them on your website as well as on their favourite marketplace...

The good news for you is that we have 5 ways to make this love affair unforgettable. First of all, you need to make sure you have a PIM (Product Information Management). Why do you need one? The answer is in these 5 points.

1. Ensure the accuracy of your product sheets

You aim for perfect communication: Product information sometimes comes from different sources that do not always communicate with each other (ERP, media server, files) . But for you, no product sheet without images, no images without descriptions, no descriptions without SEO optimization. And, of course, data on stock availability and prices must be impeccably up to date.

A Product Information PIM (Product Information Management) solution centralizes all your product data, whatever its source. All your data is brought together in a single space, at the heart of PIM, from which it can be enriched and refined by different contributors.

The PIM allows you to manage your product information efficiently:

• You follow the level of completeness of each of your product sheets on the dashboard before validating it
• You manage the rights to the photos and annotate the names of the models who carry each product. You then receive an alert before the information expires.

2. Experience the changing pace of your business with peace of mind

You aim for elasticity: Seasons come and go, trends change and your brand must therefore be as flexible as it is creative. The challenge is considerable: new information is entered, photographs are added, and SEO descriptions monopolise the teams and can cause delays in distribution. You want to streamline this dynamic of perpetual renewal.

From the PIM, you can easily manage your rates throughout the operational stages:

• You articulate your product tree according to your themes: you link and aggregate your products to create looks, collections and worlds
• From your looks, you determine your cross and up-selling in one click
• Getting started with PIM is simple and straightforward for each contributor and each role, saving you time
• You make collaboration automatic. The ticketing and notification system, which links all contributors, promotes team productivity, even from a distance

Is the season over? Archive the collection in one click and broadcast your new love story.

3. Market your products as quickly as possible

You aim for reactivity: Before being put on sale, your product information is not only complete, but also ultra attractive. From the photographer, for impeccable visuals, to the SEO manager, for optimised content, this takes time. To avoid losing sales because a product is not released, you minimize the gap between the time your product arrives in stock and the time you can communicate about its release. This is the optimisation of your Time to Market.

Sales and Marketing teams have solved this problem with the arrival of CRM, which has made customer management and animation more fluid and profitable. From now on, with PIM, this applies to the management of product data: Centralization + Fluidity + Automation = Time saving.

The fashion brands that use PIM today simply talk about a revolution in their working methods. They have considerably reduced their time to market. Jennyfer, for example, testifies of a passage from nearly 2 weeks without PIM to 24H with Quable PIM.

Reducing Time to Market has a real impact on your turnover, and PIM contributes to this impact:

• You define the roles of each person to define a smooth enrichment process
• You speed up media enrichment, which is known to be time-consuming and potentially error-prone. Quable PIM provides an application that generates a barcode based on the product EAN. Using your handheld scanner, your photographer scans each sample to inject the photographs linked to the right product directly into your PIM.
• You automate product information updates made on the PIM thanks to data flows to your E-Commerce site or your other channels

4. Boost your e-Commerce performance

You aim for optimised product sheets: The temptation to quickly put your products on sale is sometimes to the detriment of the quality of the product sheets. Customer reviews, high definition photographs with integrated zoom, technical details, story-telling and marketing discourse You want to showcase your product in a sheet that really makes you want to buy. Your objective is to provide your customer with all the keys to take the plunge.

An extremely complete, reliable and high quality product description is indeed a guarantee to improve your E-Commerce transformation rates. Especially when 1/3 of consumers have abandoned an online purchase due to a lack of product description(Shotfarm study, product information report).

And the lack of product information can have longer-term consequences that affect your profitability. We are talking about customer feedback, which is estimated to be 25% for Fashion, This is one of the most frequent problems in all sectors. Your profitability is therefore sometimes distorted by a simple error in the product description: this is in fact what 42% of consumers stress(Shotfarm study, product information report).

So we come back to the absolute necessity of pleasing and seducing that drives your clothes. How can you even consider going to a dinner party without a brand new dress or three-piece suit?

Promote your products for the meeting of their lives with the Internet user, adorn them with your most beautiful ornaments, make them shine so that the relationship lastsin the long term.

The PIM product information management system focuses on the essentials of e-commerce communication:

• You offer them visibility by filling in and centralising the SEO attributes (Title, descriptions, keywords) at the heart of the solution
• You fill in the most specific fields of your products in order to satisfy the Internet users' need for transparency (materials, origin, labels, etc.)

5. aim for international omnichannel

You aim for omnipresence: The consumer in 2018 is alert and volatile. They browse on their mobile, on their office computer or on a tablet from their living room. They receive catalogues, look for items in shops, buy online immediately or wait for seasonal promotions. Your objective is to accompany them from the beginning to the end of their purchasing journey on all these channels, with the right speech at the right time while personalising your message.

PIM is the foundation you've been looking for. It unifies your repository, it saves you time, your turnover increases and you are now ready to go omnichannel.

From the PIM :

• You distribute your product information on all fashion marketplaces. The ones you are already on but also the ones you are not (yet) on
• You generate web or paper catalogues and stylish pdf look books in a few clicks and distribute them in shops or to your distributors and suppliers
• You give your company an international boost by distributing your products in new high-potential markets thanks to the translation of your files directly into the PIM and into 50 languages

Distribute, automate, sell.

These 5 ways are the prerequisites for building the love affair between your products and consumers and have direct consequences on :

• Your operational productivity
• Your time savings (Time to Market, acceleration of your conquest strategy)
• Your competitive advantage
• Improving your e-commerce and omnichannel performance
• The growth of your business.

Conclusion

Fashion chooses the PIM to unify numerous and regularly renewed product data. The solution accompanies the changes in pace to allow products to be put on sale quickly while improving the quality of information provided to Internet users. These are the vectors of strong growth in an ultra-competitive sector.