Littlewoods streamlines its web and catalog

When privately held U.K. catalog merchant Littlewoods went to the web, it faced a daunting challenge that it is only now solving. The merchant of 24,000 products with 100,000 SKUs was accustomed to creating annual 1,200-page catalogs with supplements and sales flyers throughout the year and had worked diligently since the rise of desktop publishing systems to streamline production.

But when it went to the web in the late 1990s, its data needs suddenly changed dramatically. For instance, its need for photos skyrocketed. "All the photos for the books were done in a spread," says David Fleming, Littlewoods` IT publishing manager. "So if we had a toy spread, a group of toys would be put on a table and a picture taken. Or if we did jewelry, all the different types of rings, or necklaces or bracelets would be put on one board for a picture. That didn`t work on the web, where we want to sell each item individually. We had to cut each image into 25 separate images."

Web managers had to start thinking about each product as an individual product with product attributes, he says. That resulted in each product having its own picture and many fields of data. And it resulted in managers realizing that the data already existed within the company and it was foolish to re-create it for web use. "They realized quickly they needed a feed from the publishing system because that`s where we had all the information," Fleming says.

To provide that feed, Littlewoods is installing the new Agility product from Chicago-based Pindar Systems, which creates a single database for all product content. "We had to get away from thinking about the web like it was a book with content like the book and pages like the book," Fleming says. "We had to think about each product as a separate product with product attributes."

Creating the single database and training production staff to use it will take about two years, Fleming says, from the time the decision was made last November to the time all products are in the database and staff trained to use it in November 2003.

The single feed will not only make managing information easier, it will speed up production time for seasonal offerings on the web, Fleming says. Once the database is updated for print, the e-commerce team receives the data for web purposes. Today it must reconstruct the data. With the single database system it will reduce the six weeks it needs now to get data ready for the web and slash its need for temporary workers it usually hires to make sure it meets deadlines. "It’s more accurate and more timely and will create an improvement in productivity," Fleming says.