“Our 6-month plan was to better manage and refine our products in line with each school uniform policy. Pimberly built extra functionality into the system for our specific needs, which enabled us to achieve this objective within a month“
Head of Category Management, Monkhouse
Monkhouse, part of the Banner Group, is one of the UK’s leading independent suppliers of school-wear, print-wear, and sportswear. Banner was founded in 1987 when Mary Fawcus was asked to raise funds for the 1988 Equestrian Olympic fund. At this point, she started ordering special commemorative sweatshirts.
This is when the company came to life. Interestingly, the business is actually named after Mary’s daughter’s horse — Blue Max Banner
Before Pimberly, Monkhouse spent around 8 hours a week creating uniform bundles for each of the 3,000 schools they work with. Creating a personalized experience just wasn’t possible as it was spending hours creating these bundles.
Instead of creating seamless shopping experiences, the labor-intensive processes were creating errors and as a result, customers often received the wrong school-wear. Having a central repository for all the school-wear product data was vital. Moreover, being able to present the same product differently according to the schools’ requirements on their Banner website was also key.
Enter Link Metadata – the magic Pimberly feature. The team at Pimberly reviewed the company’s requirements and created a new feature – Link Metadata. This enables the users to enter additional data within each product to create associations/collections. For Monkhouse, they added gender, school, year, logo, etc.
This way of organizing product data means Monkhouse can create personalized online experiences for the schools. For example, only the uniforms and accessories available to each specific school are displayed. As well as dramatically reduce their SKU count making it more manageable to enrich data.
Everything is going smoothly and Pimberly is extremely user-friendly! Our experience with the project, tech, and support teams has been excellent.
Head of Category, Monkhouse
We have an estimated 1.7 million SKUs across the whole group. Before Pimberly, much of this was duplicated and redundant. Now we’ve been able to cleanse most of this data and we’re in a much stronger position data-wise.
Monkhouse
Monkhouse has multiple systems that manage and store product information across the Banner Group due to growth through acquisition. The business currently has 3 ERP systems, 30 stores, and 9 transactional websites across separate systems and divisions.
Having these disparate systems means there were discrepancies with the data across the group, not to mention the barrier to growth this also creates.
Thanks to Pimberly, Monkhouse has been able to standardize and enrich product data coming from different sources. The team at Monkhouse is already enjoying the successes of having data in the correct format. It has led to a reduction in errors, no more duplications, and reduced overhead costs by simplifying product onboarding.
A bonus benefit of having standardized product information in a central location is being able to create intelligent sales reports. These reports give the sales teams a clear indication of what school-wear products are (and more importantly aren’t) being sold. Importantly, this means the team at Monkhouse can now shape a super sales strategy. This added dimension wasn’t possible with their old way of working.
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