TradingBell

Industry: Arts & Crafts  

The Customer

One of the nation’s largest distributors of arts and craft supplies located in New Jersey.

The Challenge

The customer is challenged with creating, managing and updating product information and producing their print catalogs on time with accurate data. Every year, it takes several months to identify, consolidate, and create the year’s catalog. Adding to this, the basic description and price for the year’s catalog was to be extracted from the AS 400 system.

The Solution

TradingBell provided a turnkey solution to the customer by consolidating and aggregating product information from various sources including extracting information from the previous year's QuarkXpress catalog, loading primary SKU information from the AS 400 system using integration tools, and helped setup the initial workflow for producing print catalogs using Adobe InDesign.

A complete analysis of the entire product line was done to create the ideal hierarchical structure of the data with categories, sub categories, and product group classifications. Products were configured with attributes to capture important product technical specification that are used in print and web catalog along with information that is used for internal reporting and business intelligence.

As part of Jump Start Program, TradingBell’s team used the fully structured and normalized data, created the initial InDesign templates, and provided all the necessary samples for the customer to get started with their catalog production along with training and support.

The Result

Today, the customer is able to create their catalog and other marketing materials with 90% less time and more accurate and up-to-date content. Direct integration with AS 400 helps bring the latest pricing to the catalog before sending the catalog files to the printer.