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    Walker Edison Expands Reach to 17 Sales Channels in First 18 Months With Salsify

    The ecommerce furniture designer supports its global sales presence while managing more than 1,800 products.

    About Walker Edison

    Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, Walker Edison launched in 2006 as a small furniture supplier. Today, it’s one of the leading partners for the biggest names in ecommerce, with operations in Brazil, the U.K., and several countries in Asia.

    Walker Edison’s line of ready-to-assemble furniture is designed in-house and created to bring on-trend styles to every home at an affordable price.

    As a well-established, on-trend furniture designer, Walker Edison has new monthly product releases and runs a robust white-labeling business. This means the in-house content team manages item setup for 30 to 70 new SKUs and their corresponding styling images monthly.

    Jill Schaugaard, content manager at Walker Edison, leads the team of six employees responsible for item setup.

    The initial process of compiling product information was manual, says Schaugaard, which is especially challenging because separate teams create the marketing copy, photos, and product videos.

    Teams couldn’t view main product information, such as product names, descriptions, and other marketing copy, alongside the associated images. Walker Edison stored product data in password-protected Excel spreadsheets and saved images locally on a shared company drive.

    The team juggled keeping pace with new products, meeting each priority retailer’s requirements, and sending the corresponding images that matched each partner’s white-labeled brand needs.

    Schaugaard began looking for a better solution for her team to keep up with the speed of commerce — especially as consumer needs grew.

    "When I started at Walker Edison, there wasn't a single place where you could see an image next to a product and its information. Almost everything was stored in spreadsheets. The outdated system was working for the company at the time, but I knew there had to be a better way to manage all this information."

    Jill Schaugaard, Content Manager, Walker Edison

    Walker Edison Quickly Went Live on 10 Retailer Channels By Centralizing Data With Channel-Specific Properties in Salsify

    Schaugaard chose Salsify in 2021 for its scalable syndication capabilities and ability to store all the product information for nearly 1,800 products — including 150,000 digital assets — in one place. 

    Walker Edison worked with the technical implementation agency and Salsify partner Aleysian to help structure its data and launch on 10 retail channels within six months.

    The company went live on several major retailers, including Target, Amazon, Wayfair, Best Buy, The Home Depot, and Overstock.

    To implement all of the existing content at once, the team first adopted a consistent naming convention for digital assets and decided on a property structure for product information.

    Schaugaard’s team is part of the sales group. Each team member manages one of the company’s top six retailer accounts and one or two retailers from the top 15. This organizational structure allowed the team to focus on implementing new channels simultaneously rather than one channel at a time.

    With help from the Aleysian team, who built out their initial channels and channel mappings, the team was able to build on their knowledge and expertise to clean up product data and service their retailers independently. 

    Salsify’s ability to handle thousands of properties made it easier for the group to customize the content they send to each retailer. Most properties are based on retailer requirements, including category-specific ones.

    For example, a fireplace product listing would require information such as how big of a room it will heat, what kind of controls it has, and what kind of safety features it includes.

    Self-Service Product Catalogs Support Smaller Retailers

    Walker Edison uses digital catalogs to service some of its smaller partners. Partners can find items by category or by looking through the full catalog to identify the items that they want to sell. 

    Partners can use export capabilities to access all the product information and corresponding digital assets needed to create a listing for their sites.

    The Walker Edison team maintains an active catalog with the latest items. Partners and sales team members can hone in on the item they want by searching the catalog for a landing date or other useful parameters.

    Salsify’s formula capabilities made it possible to include thumbnail images in product exports, which increased the ease of ordering. Walker Edison can also now quickly communicate with retailers that aren’t partnered with Salsify.

    After the team successfully centralized all of their product information and digital assets and went live on priority channels with core product content, they set a new goal to include enhanced content for all of their product listings. 

    They created specific brand layouts for each retailer partnered with Salsify and syndicated it to all active listings. In 2023, the team plans to build on this by establishing a more tailored approach to enhanced content for specific SKUs.

    "The thing that really attracted us to Salsify was that it was both a PIM [product information management] and a DAM [digital asset management], meaning we could manage our product data and digital assets in the same platform. We liked that we could not only syndicate to the direct connection retailers but could build custom channels easily as well."

    — Jill Schaugaard, Content Manager, Walker Edison

    Walker Edison Saves Days of Manual Work Each Month 

    Salsify saves the Walker Edison team valuable time. They can now map 70% to 80% of the required data for retailers, which means core information is generated within seconds of starting a batch.

    Images that once took two to three days of gathering and prepping to meet retailer specifications are now automated within the channel, significantly reducing setup time.

    Today, the team has implemented 17 retailer and ecommerce channels — scaling beyond what they initially launched — with seven new endpoints.

    They plan to continue exploring additional ways to incorporate automation into their existing process, like utilizing workflow capabilities to automate and standardize the core product information they use. They also plan to schedule updates for partial content refresh to keep content current to select destinations.

    "Salsify saves us a ton of time and we love it! My team talks daily about how amazing it is that Salsify does so much work automatically compared to the extremely time-consuming, manual process we had in place before."

    — Jill Schaugaard, Content Manager, Walker Edison

    "When I started at Walker Edison, there wasn't a single place where you could see an image next to a product and its information. Almost everything was stored in spreadsheets. The outdated system was working for the company at the time, but I knew there had to be a better way to manage all this information."

    Jill Schaugaard, Content Manager, Walker Edison

    "The thing that really attracted us to Salsify was that it was both a PIM [product information management] and a DAM [digital asset management], meaning we could manage our product data and digital assets in the same platform. We liked that we could not only syndicate to the direct connection retailers but could build custom channels easily as well."

    — Jill Schaugaard, Content Manager, Walker Edison

    "Salsify saves us a ton of time and we love it! My team talks daily about how amazing it is that Salsify does so much work automatically compared to the extremely time-consuming, manual process we had in place before."

    — Jill Schaugaard, Content Manager, Walker Edison

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