Thule: Automating its entire global product content syndication with Productsup

Case

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 has around 3,300 employees at nine production facilities and 35 sales offices worldwide and is currently selling online in 81 markets on multiple channels in 23 languages. Their focus is on developing high-quality, safe, and easy-design products, helping their customers follow their passion for an active lifestyle.

Before Productsup, Thule didn’t have any centralized tool to manage all of their product data distribution to their B2B retailers and partners. This meant a lot of unnecessary labor-intensive manual work for their sales organization. After introducing the Productsup P2C platform to the business, Thule was soon able to create a consistent, global IT setup that automatically manages product data automated across 27 markets.

Challenges

• No centralized data management tool
• Manual data processing
• Slow time to market

The sales organization at Thule was struggling with its manual data collection process. They needed everything centralized to make it easier to quickly share product data in the correct format with their B2B retailers and partners.

Due to the difficulties they incurred accessing their Product Information Management (PIM) System, they were using excel sheets to manage their product data. As this process was all manual, it took a long time to get new product data to retailers and even longer to add new sales channels.

Thule’s marketing department was also experiencing difficulties providing product data aligned to each channel’s requirements, e.g., Amazon Marketplace. They found it challenging to provide the data in the mandatory formats. The team was forced to manually add information to the channels, which burned a lot of time and resources.

Solutions

• Centralization of product data
• Automated distribution
• Easy data enrichment

Thule implemented the Productsup P2C platform back in 2019. To distribute product data to their B2B retailers and partners, they used the Productsup platform to merge and centralize all the relevant information like stock, and pricing from their Product Information Management (PIM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems.

Productsup’s pre-built channel templates helped Thule syndicate their data to all channels – e.g. Google, Facebook, Amazon – and partners in record time. This alone saved huge amounts of time for the sales teams at Thule.

To enrich product data for all of their channels, Thule now uploads additional data sources to where they are automatically formatted and added to the export feed templates.

Results

• Time savings due to automation
• Fast time to market
• Higher conversion rates and ROI

Thanks to the Productsup P2C platform, Thule’s sales and marketing teams benefit from huge time savings as the manual workload was reduced to almost nothing. Data distribution processes have now been fully automated. Soon after, demand from their partners increased because they were now receiving better-quality product data.

Within the first 3 months of using the platform, Thule rolled out its data feeds to 10 markets. The 10 new markets had to be able to accommodate tens of thousands of products from 16 categories. They now export 150 feeds a day, and it takes the team just 1 hour to set up an export channel for a new market.

Overall, Thule achieved higher traffic and conversion rates with their marketing campaigns as they are now able to get the right product to the right audience at the right channel, which gave them a huge boost in marketing ROI.

Future plans

Productsup is already an integral part of Thule’s tech stack. They will use the platform to continuously explore new options, such as adding new marketplaces and direct-to-consumer (D2C) channels. The team is keen to explore Asian markets for the following growth plans (Sept. 2022).