Brand manufacturer Leatherman upgraded its legacy product information management system to Akeneo. The faster PIM system results in fewer on-site errors.
Learn from the Leatherman brand: if your systems are outdated, your content will be too.
Leatherman had a legacy product information management system, said Carl Ogden, software development manager at Leatherman Tool Group, which is a brand manufacturer of multi-tools and accessories. And he’s not joking. Ogden described the user interface for the custom-built PIM system as ancient.
The product information tool houses product data including details, measurements, descriptions, SEO keywords and images. Leatherman’s PIM system was written in a code that was no longer supported by most computers, nor was it available to buy.
“It was written in Visual Studio 2008. I had to have a Windows 2008 server running to keep this thing working,” Ogden said.
Ogden worried about the stability of the system. Not only this, its employees loathed using it.
“They didn’t like it. It was slow and awful, so they wouldn’t do anything. They would bribe other people into it,” Ogden said.
What’s worse is when this poor backend experience translates to the customer experience. For example, a product may have all of the correct information in the backend, but it wouldn’t display to the shopper if an employee didn’t toggle it on.
Or, a product’s units of measure would show up using a different country’s standardization. This is a crucial detail as Leatherman sells its products in dozens of countries.
“It was very common for [conversion metrics] to slip through, to get forgotten, for U.S. metrics to be showing up on the physical sites in Europe, which is ugly and embarrassing,” Ogden said.
Leatherman chooses Akeneo for its PIM system
Ogden had campaigned for an upgrade for years. After management greenlighted the project and a six-month implementation phase, Leatherman went live with Akeneo’s product information management system in the summer of 2024.
To Ogden’s delight, the Akeneo system is much faster and he no longer hears complaints from employees. One way he worked to ensure this was by allowing employees to vote on their favorite interface out of a pool of options before the go-live date.
Besides keeping its employees happy, Akeneo’s system now houses more information across departments, including data for its ecommerce and marketing teams. It has about 20 licenses for the database.
More organization means fewer on-site errors
The PIM systems provides a better format for employees in input data, allowing information to display in a uniform way and there are no longer errors that slip through.
“Our quality team is no longer finding all these errors every time we do our modification,” Ogden said.
What’s more, Leatherman can now have all of its product pages tailored to the website it is selling, such as niche marketplaces in other countries.
“We can localize the data, we can channelize the data, but just the complexity and to be able to change it per market, per channel, is something we could have never dreamed of with our old system,” he said.
Ogden did not disclose costs.
Next, Leatherman wants to have its data quality team to start using Akeneo. Consumers often leave valuable feedback in product reviews about quality, such as this feature broke or this feature is handy. The quality team could look at an artificial intelligence-generated summary of reviews within Akeneo to incorporate these comments into its product design. The marketing team could also look to see which product features customers continually highlight in positive reviews and work to include those features in product descriptions and SEO keywords, he said.
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