Tom Chattaway of Lifetime Brands Europe: Expand With Centralized Data

At Lifetime Brands Europe, we have about 7,000 products total — and nearly 4,500 active products, sold across 70 regions — but we had no central hub to help us stay organized.

Whenever we got requests for content, we’d have to delve through an Excel or SAP file. We constantly had to chase files.

I’m Tom Chattaway, and I’m the digital manager for Lifetime Brands Europe. Toward the end of 2019, we realized that we needed a centralized content hub if we wanted to be more accessible to our customers.

We looked at many smaller companies for solutions, but we ultimately went with Salsify because it had the integrations we needed.

Salsify has brought a massive change for the better to our business. All our processes take significantly less time, and we can push content live or send it to partners in a matter of minutes. We no longer have to scramble through those Excel sheets to get things done.

Starting With Amazon Success

During the initial onboarding for Salsify, we started by looking at what we needed to prioritize. The first priority we identified was getting our content in the correct format for our partners and customers.

So we spent about two months making sure all product content in Salsify was right from the start. Then, we looked at which channels to prioritize, starting with Amazon.

There was a lot of back-and-forth testing as we worked on the Amazon integration to see if it worked in different regions because, of course, you have different vendors and different vendor codes for different countries.

There are also differences between what we sell in each country, so ensuring that we had the right fields in place in Salsify really helped.

We realized early on how beneficial it could be to be clever with the Salsify formula mapping. You can save yourself a lot of time by ensuring that you have the correct content in Salsify — rather than doing things custom for each region.

The prep work for all the different regions in Amazon was the biggest effort that saved us a lot of time.

Growing Globally With Accurate Data

One of the primary things we needed to be able to do with a centralized content hub was make sure the data we sent to all the different channels, across all markets, was as up-to-date as possible. 

With the old spreadsheet model, the data that was on a website in a certain region could be completely different from the updated data in the core systems due to slow updates. 

Now, we send out daily or weekly files from Salsify to all our different regional partners, so their data is always accurate. On top of just making everything more efficient, this has also helped us grow globally. In many cases, we weren't active in certain markets because we didn't have the data to support those lines. 

With Salsify, we can manage channel-specific content easily. We're able to create bespoke content schedules per retailer, by channel, to ensure the retailer receives the content they need at the pace they require. This allows us to list more items with all of our partners across the world.

Expanding to D2C Commerce

Previously, we had never sold to the end consumer directly. We were founded in 1850, and in the last 170 years, the business has primarily sold directly to businesses.

Thanks to Salsify, we are starting to grow a direct-to-consumer (D2C) business.

We sell on Shopify, and every single bit of content that powers that site comes from Salsify. We are able to manage the content, product range, and selection for the D2C platform.

We can add a new product to Salsify, and sync the channel — and it’s on the Shopify site in two minutes. It makes it a lot easier to manage our D2C channel, which, in turn, means we get to talk about and link to our own products.

Saving Time With Centralization

"We manage everything across our B2B and D2C websites from a single system — as well as sending content across to our loyal customers and partners.

Everything is managed and pushed over from Salsify. It means we can get more accurate and up-to-date content in front of our customers. We can add a new product to Salsify, sync the channel, and it's there in two minutes — available for all of our customers right away."
— Tom Chattaway, Digital Manager, Lifetime Brands Europe

The amount of time we’ve been able to save across all processes has been significant. Many processes are more rigorous in the sense that they’re more thorough and exact, yet they are still less hands-on. Tasks that used to take days now take minutes.

It also helps that the Salsify tool is not only easy to use — it’s also quite fun to use. It’s the first solution we’ve ever had that could handle all the content and data that we need to deal with in a single source of truth for product content.

Being able to manage and look after everything in one place makes my day-to-day work a lot easier. I honestly couldn’t sing Salsify’s praises enough.