The Thule story begins back in 1942 in Sweden. Initially producing automobile accessories for outdoor enthusiasts and travelers, the organization has grown into a global brand and household name for high-quality sporting goods for active families and outdoor enthusiasts. After 80 years of growth, Thule is currently selling online in 81 markets on multiple channels and in 23 languages.
How Thule is managing commerce anarchy?
We recently spoke to Jamal Tarakji, Product Owner SaaS, about how the Thule Group is managing the immense digital complexity that is proving so challenging for many businesses in the commerce world.
What kind of challenges are facing businesses selling products on multiple channels and markets?
With all of the channels and touchpoints available to consumers, businesses need to ensure they get the right products to the right channels on time and with the correct data. If they can’t do this, they risk damaging their brand.
Consumers click away in the blink of an eye, and a loss of trust can be instant and permanent. We deal in high-quality goods, so it isn’t inexpensive to find new customers in new markets. Businesses like ours need to maintain customer trust and loyalty.
Why did you look for a P2C content syndication partner ?
We’ve been working with Productsup for over 3 years. We began searching for solutions as the workload for our sales organization became too much. There was a lot of labor-intensive manual work and too many emails. We asked our B2B publishers and retailers what they needed, and they told us that they needed to deliver detailed data, quickly.
We were trying to move data to our customers using excel sheets to gather data from multiple data sources. It was a real challenge. We initially implemented FTP servers for the sales teams and our customers to download, but it was soon obvious that this was time-consuming and difficult. Our whole data system needed to be restructured.
When we found Productsup, we immediately saw how their solutions would be able to automate so many of our manual processes.
Why did you choose Productsup over other P2C businesses?
I was directly involved in the procurement process at the time and I can remember seeing how multidimensional the Productsup P2C platform was. The support teams were also excellent from the start.
We were able to quickly integrate Productsup’s solutions into our systems. And that’s saying something, our systems at the time were very complex. We were holding data for tens of thousands of products across 16 categories. It took us just 3 months to roll out Productsup in 10 markets. We were soon exporting 150 feeds a day.
Were there any technical challenges when you started working with the P2C platform?
We originally had two different Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in operation. The P2C platform, however, made it easy to switch from two to one ERP system without any downtime.
What are the major benefits of P2C Product Content Syndication and Feed management going forward?
It only takes us around 1 hour to add new channels in new markets. This gives us huge flexibility in our sales strategy. Productsup automated so many processes that we now have a lot more time to focus on growth.
The support teams are amazing, and the whole technical setup is really easy to use, even for people without technical training.
What is your favorite feature on the P2C platform?
That’s easy, I like the rule boxes which we can implement to create automated data enhancement processes. There are so many different types of boxes and you can also create custom boxes. This means that we don’t have to worry about processes that used to take up a lot of our time.
