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We explore how Kwikee, a daughter company of SGS, champions product information and digital asset management on a global scale for its retail clients with the help of censhare.
Our customers are doing great things with censhare and in this series of blogs, we share with you a few of these inspiring success stories. This one comes from Kwikee, a daughter company of SGS which is championing product information and digital asset management on a global scale for its retail clients.
Kwikee started off in 1968 distributing product illustrations and black and white photos to retailers in large format clip art books. Over the years, it’s moved to reflect changing shopping habits and advances in technology. Today it claims to “help our clients drive sales with the highest quality product images and data, and to provide unparalleled distribution of these assets to consumers in marketing and ecommerce channels.”
Here’s how it works: huge companies such as Unilever, Kellogg’s and Coca Cola have hundreds of sub brands and thousands of products. Each product has a tonne of data associated with it, from size and weight to how many calories it contains, what wattage it runs at, or what age it’s suitable for. Then there’s all the ancillary data like item numbers, barcodes, and accompanying imagery, packaging plans, and even recipes.
And this is really, really, complicated, which is where Kwikee helps. It provides a central database for brands to create, store, manage, and distribute this data to retailers in an automated way, so that they can in turn provide it to their customers. Kwikee also has an impressive facility where its teams take physical products, photograph them, weigh and measure them, and input all the data on behalf of its client.
Ecommerce retailers demand data in particular formats, and Kwikee handles all the transformations with what it calls a distribution engine. Brands can also automate what imagery accompanies what products on what platform, so consumers get the most appropriate shots depending on how they’re shopping.
So where does censhare come in? In short, we provide the central database, replacing Kwikee’s old, self built, SQL based database. Since 2016, it’s worked with its parent company SGS to implement censhare and build a tonne of services on top that allow it to create and distribute data on 420,000 products. This includes more than 1.1 million images and over 9 million files in total.
And it’s even been able to develop an Alexa skill and branded APIs based on censhare’s back end.
For the full picture, you can check out the customer success story here.