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    Jackson Family Wines Harnesses Salsify PIM Configurations To Reduce Manual Work

    The wine company leverages unique data governance and workflow configurations to drive efficiency.

    About Jackson Family Wines

    Founded in 1982 and still family owned and operated, Jackson Family Wines stands at the forefront of global viticulture, embracing environmental stewardship and artisan winemaking. With vineyards in premier regions throughout the U.S., Canada, England, France, Italy, Australia, Chile, and South Africa, the company is dedicated to producing quality, estate-driven wines that reflect the unique character of their place. Featuring renowned brands such as Kendall-Jackson, La Crema, and Freemark Abbey, the family’s commitment has cemented its reputation as a key player in the industry, continuing a legacy of excellence and innovation.

    Evaluating Tech Stack Upgrades To Drive Improvements and Innovation

    In 2021, Jackson Family Wines began evaluating and updating its technology stack as part of its broader digital transformation.

    Jackson Family Wines selected Salsify’s Product Experience Management (PXM) solution, a central source of truth for all product content and a syndication solution for top retailers, including Walmart, Target, Total Wine & More, Instacart, and Albertsons.

    The brand also leverages Salsify to improve its content management process for its direct-to-consumer (D2C) business.

    Today, post-implementation, all of Jackson Family Wines’ product information is managed in Salsify before being published on the digital shelf.

    The team implemented complex role-based workflows, which help surface only the information each team member needs to see, driving focus, functional clarity, and better cross-team alignment.

    “At Jackson Family Wines, we understand that commerce is now digital-first,” says Bailie Duncan, Lead Marketing Technology (MarTech) Product Owner at Jackson Family Wines.

    “Digital transformation requires significant change management among business users to ensure alignment with this mindset. Additionally, it’s essential to understand the customer and meet them where they are, necessitating a strong presence on both retailers’ websites and our winery’s websites. This is where Salsify becomes invaluable,” says Duncan.

    One remaining challenge after initial implementation was determining the right data structure to support selling across many different channels and more than 40 distinct brands.

    Initially, Jackson Family Wines was only using Salsify to syndicate to their 3-tier partners: distributors and retailers.

    The data required for these endpoints didn’t require a hierarchical data model, so Jackson Family Wines managed its products in a flat data model with no parent/variant relationships. All product information was captured against a single sellable SKU, but this required repeated data input across related SKUs — creating more manual work for the team. 

    With the shift to leveraging Salsify as Jackson Family Wines’ total product information management (PIM) and PXM solution for all commerce endpoints, it became evident that to scale, the data model must change.

    “The challenge we faced was how to scale our business with a massive increase in SKU count and how to efficiently manage product data that could be shared across brand, product line, or vintage, while also allowing for individuality for our wines. We were entering all the data on every single SKU regardless of whether it had shared attribution, which was very time-consuming.”

    — Bailie Duncan, Lead MarTech Product Owner, Jackson Family Wines

    Saving Valuable Hours With Automatic Hierarchy Categorization

    To drive efficiency and scale across its teams and thousands of products, the MarTech team leveraged the agility of Salsify’s platform to build creative configurations.

    First, they used Salsify PIM’s hierarchy capabilities to create a detailed four-tier data structure for Jackson Family Wines’ more than 18,000 SKUs. Now, as new products flow from Jackson Family Wines’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) system into Salsify, they’re automatically categorized into this hierarchy, allowing for shared attribution across brand and product lines.

    With anywhere from 700 to 1,000 new products being launched every year, this process saves the team hours.

    The hierarchy also created a better shopping experience on product detail pages (PDPs). Customers can click on a SKU and toggle between different package sizes of the same vintage or product line — versus seeing all the product sizes listed out as distinct SKUs.

    They also configured custom readiness reports, or channels, that manage the creation and assignment of SKUs to their proper product hierarchy, reducing the manual work that would otherwise be required to manage the data model for thousands of SKUs.

    Aligning Brand Teams With Workflows

    When it came to keeping teams aligned, the team built detailed workflows that automatically alert the right user groups to address incomplete product information or missing retailer-specific attributes.

    Each brand’s marketing team controls what information they want to apply to their products, allowing them to maintain their unique brand identity while still working collaboratively across teams.

    Jackson Family Wines also found that the Salsify-to-Salesforce channel helps the team get products to market much faster.

    “After the initial setup, it was pretty much self-serve,” Duncan says. “As we continue to grow, that was critical for us,  because we constantly need to create custom attributes.”

    “The fact that you can have a taxonomy but also automate product references across products is so important. We figured out how to manipulate the tools that were available to eliminate busy work for the team, which speaks to how agile Salsify’s platform is.”

    — Bailie Duncan, Lead MarTech Product Owner, Jackson Family Wines

    With the suite of tools available to easily update data and configure taxonomies, Jackson Family Wines has seen a faster time to market and less manual work required to identify sellable SKUs.

    Leveraging Salsify formulas and templated exports, the team now schedules automated publishes for their SKUs, driving automation and efficiency.

    A year ago, only a few people on the Jackson Family Wines team had access to Salsify. Duncan says that number is now up to 24 team members and growing.

    “There’s been a push to get more people using Salsify, and more people are proactively asking to use it,” Duncan says. “That alone shows that it's been a successful implementation and a valuable tool for our business.”

    "Salsify has proven to be a valuable asset to our business. It has enabled us to accelerate our time to market, delivering superior content across all channels. Equally crucial has been our effort to observe how businesses beyond the wine industry succeed in e-commerce. Creativity in utilizing the tools at our disposal is essential for achieving our goals, and Salsify empowers us to do just that."

    — Bailie Duncan, Lead MarTech Product Owner, Jackson Family Wines

    “The challenge we faced was how to scale our business with a massive increase in SKU count and how to efficiently manage product data that could be shared across brand, product line, or vintage, while also allowing for individuality for our wines. We were entering all the data on every single SKU regardless of whether it had shared attribution, which was very time-consuming.”

    — Bailie Duncan, Lead MarTech Product Owner, Jackson Family Wines

    “The fact that you can have a taxonomy but also automate product references across products is so important. We figured out how to manipulate the tools that were available to eliminate busy work for the team, which speaks to how agile Salsify’s platform is.”

    — Bailie Duncan, Lead MarTech Product Owner, Jackson Family Wines

    "Salsify has proven to be a valuable asset to our business. It has enabled us to accelerate our time to market, delivering superior content across all channels. Equally crucial has been our effort to observe how businesses beyond the wine industry succeed in e-commerce. Creativity in utilizing the tools at our disposal is essential for achieving our goals, and Salsify empowers us to do just that."

    — Bailie Duncan, Lead MarTech Product Owner, Jackson Family Wines

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