The Gerson Companies Chief Technology and Sales Officer Orin Borgelt joined Salsify EVP of Customer Success Lee Feigenbaum last week to discuss the creative ways he and his team solved the digital challenges the seasonal decor company was facing. Since implementing Salsify, Gerson has seen a 77% year over year boost in sales and sped time to market. Below are some of our favorite topics the executives discussed during the recent webinar.
The Challenge of Global Manufacturing
Because Gerson has manufacturing in China, and distributes products in bulk to both big-box retailers and smaller more mom and pop shops, it had to find a way to reduce the limitations of data visualization and access across multiple teams across the globe. Additionally, meeting the different product content requirements of those big-box retailers meant that getting and retaining unique data points was becoming difficult with their pre-existing ERP software.
How to Centralize Your Product Information
Having a place where all the product content lives allowed Gerson employees to have a go-to location to verify product information like price, dimensions, materials, stock availability, etc. This feature also enabled Gerson’s overseas manufacturing inspectors to better compare product specifications with the real-life manufactured product, enhancing quality control standards and reducing the need for expensive ERP licenses.
How to Reduce Time to Market
Thanks to the highly centralized product content management capabilities, Gerson employees can now quickly and efficiently edit product page information, verify product attributes and publish to ecommerce retailers like Amazon and Walmart. This means that Gerson products can convert at higher rates across a longer period of time - and it reduces the amount of lift needed from employees to reach the market.
How to Enable Your Long Tail Retailers
Gerson understands that when it comes to ecommerce, you win by enabling both first-party and third-party sales, and that’s what they have achieved with their g-commerce platform - a creative use of Salsify’s digital catalogs feature which allows small shops to purchase in bulk for their own reselling purposes.
What’s Next For Gerson?
With the holiday season coming up, Orin is excited to leverage the platform even more to better serve Gerson’s digital commerce needs. He knows that the limitations of the product are not set in stone, and that new features can always be adapted to the products, market and customers Gerson is trying to reach. Among the things he is most excited about are investing in eye-catching media like 360-spins, videos and other images, and enhancing search capabilities.
