Lifetime Brands Europe Finds New Successes With a Single Source of Truth

The kitchenware and tabletop brand streamlines and expands its online business with Salsify.

About Lifetime Brands Europe

In 1850, a man named Thomas Plant began manufacturing and selling iron tools and household products. Over the decades, KitchenCraft became known as a market leader in kitchenware and homeware.

KitchenCraft is now part of Lifetime Brands Europe, a leading global provider of kitchenware, tableware, and other home goods. From its humble beginnings over 170 years ago, the company has grown to a worldwide business with 22 brands that are sold all over the world.

Challenge

Lifetime Brands Europe has about 7,000 total product lines being sold in 70 markets. This massive footprint made its old approach of managing ecommerce with Excel and SAP unsustainable. The team was constantly wasting time chasing down files when partners asked for content.

They recognized that they needed a better approach. To meet its partners' and customers' needs, they needed a centralized platform for their data.

"We realized that if we wanted to be more accessible as a business, especially with our online retailers, we needed to make sure that we were very easy to work with. We needed to be able to send customers all of our product content really easily right away."

— Tom Chattaway, Digital Manager, Lifetime Brands Europe

Solution

Setting Up for Success on Amazon

Lifetime Brands Europe started its Salsify journey by prioritizing its goals and planning ahead. The team knew they wanted to get their content in the right format to start, and they knew they wanted to prioritize Amazon as the first channel they went live on with Salsify.

The organization spent about two months making sure the content they put in Salsify was accurate. Then they went through several rounds of testing to make sure they could sync with Amazon across all their priority markets. This preparation paid off with an easy and effective Amazon launch.

Better Content Sharing With Less Effort

Every retailer is different, and before getting Salsify, Lifetime Brands Europe struggled to give each retailer the content they needed in the format required. Now, they’re able to use Salsify to speed that process up significantly.

Not only that, but Salsify also helps them keep all retailers abreast of content updates. Instead of having to create new reports every time something changes, they can now send regular reports daily or weekly with less manual effort.

'We get more synchronized content out to customers a lot easier … Now we send out daily files or weekly files from Salsify to all those different partners, so we can make sure that they have the latest content."

— Tom Chattaway, Digital Manager, Lifetime Brands Europe

Results

From 160 Products on TMall to 1,000

These streamlined content formatting and delivery processes have helped Lifetime Brands Europe expand its online retail efforts. One of the best examples of this is how they were able to grow their presence in China via TMall.

TMall demands a very specific content format, and those demands were challenging for the team to meet before Salsify. However, they’re now able to easily provide content in the format needed — as well as properly formatted updates that get delivered weekly. Where they once sold 160 products on TMall, KitchenCraft now sells 1,000.

An Opportunity for D2C

Previously, Lifetime Brands Europe was exclusively a B2B business. Thanks to Salsify, they can sell on a direct-to-consumer (D2C) channel for the first time. Lifetime Brands Europe has set up a D2C website powered by Shopify, and all content powering that site is delivered via Salsify.

When a new product is added to the Salsify system, it can be synced with the Shopify site and pushed live within minutes. Lifetime Brands Europe now has the power to sell its own products and tell its own brand story.

"Being able to manage and look after content in a single place just makes my day-to-day work a lot easier to manage … I honestly couldn't sing praises high enough."

— Tom Chattaway, Digital Manager, Lifetime Brands Europe

"We realized that if we wanted to be more accessible as a business, especially with our online retailers, we needed to make sure that we were very easy to work with. We needed to be able to send customers all of our product content really easily right away."

— Tom Chattaway, Digital Manager, Lifetime Brands Europe

'We get more synchronized content out to customers a lot easier … Now we send out daily files or weekly files from Salsify to all those different partners, so we can make sure that they have the latest content."

— Tom Chattaway, Digital Manager, Lifetime Brands Europe

"Being able to manage and look after content in a single place just makes my day-to-day work a lot easier to manage … I honestly couldn't sing praises high enough."

— Tom Chattaway, Digital Manager, Lifetime Brands Europe

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