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    Kids2 Drastically Improves Digital Shelf Outcomes With Salsify

    The infant and toddler toy and product manufacturer saved time and increased efficiency with improved data governance and streamlined automation.

    About Kids2, Inc.

    Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Kids2, Inc. is a global company that designs holistic solutions to help early-stage parents and families.

    Kids2 designs and manufactures brand products, including Ingenuity, Bright Starts, Baby Einstein, Summer by Ingenuity, and SwaddleMe by Ingenuity.

    Maintaining Thousands of Products Called for Constant Updates 

    Kids2 reaches more than 90 countries worldwide, selling nearly 1,000 products across three mega-brands on 80-plus digital channels. 

    With such a large inventory comes the need for constant SKU updates, especially on retail giants like Amazon, Walmart, and Target. 

    In 2021, Dawn Powell, senior product information manager at Kids2, joined the company as an ecommerce channel specialist. 

    Her team manages the efficiency, accuracy, and quality of more than 75,000 digital assets to ensure they meet retailer requirements. 

    Powell also works closely with a team of Kids2’s digital merchandisers and shelf managers who support the company’s major retailer customers. 

    “When I began working at Kids2, I saw that we already had clear data governance in the system, but what we needed was better internal adoption and automation on our retailer channels,” says Powell.

    Powell’s team wanted a better way to access content, create automatic syndications, and gain retailer insights. 

    “Keeping our content up to date is an ongoing challenge. Often, retailers publish updates that we don't always have visibility on until after it goes live, if at all. Automating content publication and the use of Insights allows us to make and verify real-time changes and eliminates the possibility of a retailer removing a product from their website.”

    — Dawn Powell, Senior Product Information Manager, Kids2

    Effective, Quick Product Content Updates With Powerful Channel Syndication

    As a Salsify customer since 2014, Kids2 has used Salsify’s flexible data modeling to create a centralized source of truth for its product information. 

    This allows the team to easily manage product data and quickly meet each channel's requirements. Additionally, the team leverages 20 Salsify digital catalogs to help their sales and marketing teams share content with many of their customers.

    “Salsify gives us visibility as to what content is there, what can be updated, and whether there are potential automations,” says Powell.

    Salsify’s automation and direct connections have played a critical role in Kids2’s success on Amazon, Walmart, and Target.

    “Salsify makes it easy to be able to bulk publish and simply send everything at once instead of having to go into each of the retailer's portals and manually upload our product information,” says Julia Riley, digital merchandiser at Kids2. 

    “Content gets pushed over all at once, and after, the feedback in our Salsify channels is helpful to identify what required content was missing so we can quickly resolve errors,” she adds.

    The team has set up product lists in Salsify that automatically send daily updated content to major retailers. They’ve gotten new images on Walmart, Amazon, and Target live in under 30 minutes. 

    Before Salsify, it would take days and sometimes weeks to go live on each of these sites.

    Not only does each retailer have its own set of requirements, but they also have unique processes and technology on the receiving end of the data. 

    For example, Amazon Vendor Central often changes its requirements up to a hundred times yearly, and Target has an initial content validation step that’s required for all new items before the content goes live.  

    Despite these differences, Kids2 can use Salsify to access the latest retailer requirements, review retailer feedback, and track the status of their product content in one place. This ensures successful content delivery and speeds up go-to-market timelines.

    Kids2 works with global retailers, which means that their product information needs to be translated and localized before being sent to market. 

    Leveraging a Smartcat-Salsify integration to quickly translate content has enabled the Kids2 team to easily centralize, manage, and publish translated content to reach retailers and consumers around the world.

    “Salsify makes it easy to be able to bulk upload [to key retailers]. Just being able to publish everything at once instead of having to go into each of the retailer's portals and update. Content gets pushed over at once, and then the feedback is helpful knowing what was missing that's required.”

    — Julia Riley, Digital Merchandiser, Kids2

    Improving Content and Performance Across the Digital Shelf 

    The Kids2 team uses Salsify’s integrated digital shelf reporting to guide their content optimization strategy. 

    Using Product Page reporting as their guide, the team makes changes to their content based on performance and industry best practices. 

    Because the reporting data is right alongside their product information in Salsify, they can then quickly get those improvements out to market.

    “We're also constantly making sure our content is the best it can be on retailer sites. We frequently launch new products, but we will also go back regularly to look at how we can continue to improve the content of legacy SKUs for optimal sales performance,” says Powell.

    Salsify Brand Compliance reporting also helps the team catch inaccuracies or missing items from a listing. An example of this would be if a product page doesn't have the correct product title or if it’s missing an image.

    “One nice thing that I think all of us have sort of geeked out over is to see the [Product Page] grades changing,” Powell says. “With Salsify, we know what changed on the product page, and we can track to see how that change influenced the grade, hopefully as an improvement. If the grade drops, we know how to address that.”

    The Kids2 team has created its own custom grade thresholds, holding itself to a higher standard of quality content than competitors. 

    They created their grading benchmarks by:

    • Collecting retailer partners’ content best practices;
    • Researching the competitive landscape across brands;
    • Monitoring what top sellers are doing at each retailer; and 
    • Tracking each retailer’s trends. 

    Having their internal standard built into Salsify allows the team to repeat these best practices and remain consistent throughout the business.

    “The team can see what they're doing in Salsify and how content changes affect the reporting score. Seeing that impact shows the importance of them completing the task in a workflow. What’s more, it's beneficial to the company to have the whole overall picture,” says Stacey Leveille-Casseus, digital merchandiser at Kids2.

    Salsify is an integral tool for the Kids2 go-to-market team, with 300 global users in the platform from sales, brand marketing, and ecommerce. Data collection for each product happens across the organization and is facilitated with workflows.

    “Our sales team has realized how easy it is to get content out to our retailers with the assistance of Salsify channels. And so, we've had a huge bump in the number of channels that we've added, whether they're direct API connections or whether they are export template channels that we've been using,” says Powell.

    Most recently, the team was faced with a fast turnaround request for 150 products. They were able to meet the deadline with Salsify. Not only did they have a relevant, organized set of content for every SKU, but they also used Macy’s requirements to match and download what was required quickly.

    “By looking at the data regularly, Salsify helps us optimize and double down on what’s working. We know content changes are helping improve sales.”

    — Dawn Powell, Senior Product Information Manager, Kids2

    “Keeping our content up to date is an ongoing challenge. Often, retailers publish updates that we don't always have visibility on until after it goes live, if at all. Automating content publication and the use of Insights allows us to make and verify real-time changes and eliminates the possibility of a retailer removing a product from their website.”

    — Dawn Powell, Senior Product Information Manager, Kids2

    “Salsify makes it easy to be able to bulk upload [to key retailers]. Just being able to publish everything at once instead of having to go into each of the retailer's portals and update. Content gets pushed over at once, and then the feedback is helpful knowing what was missing that's required.”

    — Julia Riley, Digital Merchandiser, Kids2

    “By looking at the data regularly, Salsify helps us optimize and double down on what’s working. We know content changes are helping improve sales.”

    — Dawn Powell, Senior Product Information Manager, Kids2

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