Manual Processes Lead to ‘Content Bottleneck’ and Lost Sales
UMA Home Décor sells its products, such as furniture, accent furniture, and other décor, to many retailers, including brick-and-mortar stores like Bob’s Discount Furniture, Ashley Furniture, and HomeGoods, as well as online channels like Amazon, Overstock, and Lowe’s Home Improvement.
UMA manufactures 7,500 new items every year — with about 1,600 items released every few months. Each of their retailers has specific and unique requirements for product content submission, which presented challenges in developing all of the required content.
“We had a content bottleneck problem,” says Rebekka Meyers, director of creative and content at UMA Home Décor. “A single product might need 20 unique versions of the title to satisfy each channel’s requirements, plus a different set of descriptions, bullets, and romance copy. That doesn’t include up to 150 core properties that also needed to be sent to each channel. It could take us well over nine months to get the information together for one set of products, but we had 1,600 new products being added to our queue every six months. There was no way we could keep up.”
With a backlog of product content waiting to be sent to retailers, UMA had products sitting in its warehouse it couldn’t sell. Its team was also unable to fully optimize the content for each channel to maximize product search results and enhance the shopper experience.
“We had to stay focused on getting basic information to each retailer so that our products could start selling,” Meyers says. “We didn’t have the capacity to strategically manage the content to drive incremental sales.”
“We reduced the time to finish all content to weeks instead of months. We reduced the number of copywriters to two and have our team working on more strategic initiatives to increase sales.”
— Rebekka Meyers, Director of Creative and Content, UMA Home Décor
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