Mastering Complex Data: How Furniturebox Scaled Globally with Pimberly

“Pimberly really understood our product structure – we needed confidence that a platform could work with us on complicated and configurable products.”

Marketing Director, Furniturebox

4,000

SKUs before Pimberly

+19,000

SKUs since Pimberly

12

Marketplaces

Founded in 2015 by schoolfriends Monty George and Dan Beckles Furniturebox began by selling furniture directly on eBay after noticing the long delivery times common with furniture suppliers. They had a clear vision to improve the customer experience, so Monty bought a container of furniture to sell and deliver faster. The business quickly gained traction, so much so that due to their phenomenal success, Monty and Dan decided to not to go to university and focus solely on getting Furniturebox off the ground.

Since then, Furniturebox has been steadily scaling its product line to offer trendy, affordable furniture inspired by designs from leading brands, but with superior service, two years ago saw the introduction of free next-day delivery before 8pm for orders, and a seven day customer service proposition, further cementing their stellar reputation.

A large part of their catalogue is bundles of multiple products, so Furniturebox needed an information management system that tracked these product relationships and hierarchies in systematic way. “We needed something that put all our product data at our fingertips, to help us create export templates for channels, and ad hoc exports for one-off reports.” they said “Pimberly’s interfaces for imports and exports are both really powerful, and intuitive to use.”

Creating a single source of truth

Prior to Pimberly, Furniturebox relied on having data living across various spreadsheets, making it cumbersome to extract, manipulate, and deploy. This complicated and slowed down their operations, especially when scaling to new platforms. Knowing that their product range and number of marketplaces was due to increase significantly, Furniturebox adopted Pimberly to centralise its data management, using it as the company’s single source of truth for product information.

Before implementation, we asked the team to complete training sessions with us and create example data. This gave Furniturebox the confidence that our offering is well thought out and that their teams had a comprehensive understanding of the platform once handed over.

With Pimberly, the company no longer needs to rely on multiple team members to handle product listings across different platforms. By utilising Pimberly’s export templates for example, Furniturebox can easily list products in new marketplaces, notably speeding up their time to market. Pimberly also manages Furniture ox’s pricing across thousands of products, particularly during sales events. This automation allows them to stay competitive while focusing on growth.

furniturebox founders dan and monty

Help with Expansion

Marketing became central to Furniturebox’s growth strategy, with the brand expanding into multiple marketplaces, including the UK, US, and Germany, faster than ever before. It became apparent that they needed a system that could keep pace with this rapid expansion and streamline their complex product data.

Introducing complicated product categories (such as dining sets which count for almost half of all their sales) with varying specifications, Pimberly’s Schema and flexible structure accommodates the complexity of these products, allowing the team to manage attributes such as colours, materials, and measurements with ease. By only displaying the relevant attributes for each product type, this ensures accurate data and no need for hundreds of unused fields.

With the time saved from Pimberly’s implementation, Furniturebox has been able to focus on expanding into the US, with plans to enter major marketplaces like Target and Walmart. They are also eyeing growth in Europe, with a focus on Germany. The ease of translating and localizing data with Pimberly has made this expansion more feasible.

Time as an Expense

Co-Founders Dan and Monty, having done almost every role within the company, knew how much time and effort manual processes were costing the business. With time being their largest expense, Furniturebox realised they needed a more efficient system to consolidate their data and streamline operations to support their expansion into more marketplaces like B&Q, The Range, Wayfair, Amazon, Tesco, and beyond.

Pimberly’s lifecycle tool enables the product, marketing, and compliance teams to collaborate more effectively. Triggers have been established for every step of the product lifecycle – from descriptions to photography – so that the next team member in the chain can start their part of the lifecycle, ensuring seamless communication and workflow between departments.

Pimberly’s integration with BigCommerce allows Furniturebox to streamline their operations even further. They can prioritize and launch batches of listings across platforms in a single afternoon – what used to take hours each week now only requires a few clicks, and the listings are live.

Looking to the Future

Furniturebox is currently testing Pimberly’s Vendor Portal, which allows suppliers to validate their data, so instead of manually reviewing spreadsheet submissions, the team can validate the data and make it more detailed. Having options such as grey and light grey or beige and cappuccino, can cause a lot of problems down the line when products are linked to the website and customers try to filter (it can even create whole new filters!). A comprehensive Vendor Portal gives Furniturebox more control over their data, making it cohesive and consumer ready.

An image of Pimberly PIM platform

Easily Import

You can quickly import data into Pimberly from multiple sources in any form. The platform can connect to all your supplier, manufacturer and data feeds in minutes. You’ll see faster product on-boarding with less work!

Centrally Manage

Pimberly manages all of your product information, attributes and assets. Dashboards give a clear view of completeness across product ranges, and with the power to handle unlimited SKUs, Pimberly grows with your business.