Marbles smartens store and site operations with Salsify

Chicago – When a retailer includes the word “brain” right in its name, a certain level of operational intelligence is expected. For 30-plus-unit specialty educational toy and game retailer Marbles: The Brain Store, smartening up operations has included organizing product data on the Salsify product information management platform to provide merchandise intelligence across the organization.



“In spring 2014, we decided to replatform our e-commerce site and needed to move all the content out of the old site, as well as add new content which old platform didn’t allow,” said Hallie Steube, director of marketing at Marbles. “We selected Salsify and synced it to our new ShopVisible platform in time for the 2014 holiday season.”



Initially, Marbles used the cloud-based Salsify solution to call out specific product fields that made listing products on the new e-commerce site easier. However, following initial rollout, other departments within the retailer began discovering they could also use its product information management capabilities to address various issues.



“The marketing department was able to create targeted online gift catalogs of 10 specific items and send them to different media outlets,” recalled Steube. “Store associates could be directed to follow specific product placement fields to guide store display set-up.”



In addition, during 2015 Marbles began extending its use of Salsify by syncing the solution with an SAP inventory distribution management system to allow a real-time enterprise view of which products are in or out of which stores.



The platform also delivers special store-specific product catalogs that inform associates and managers of what products should be in-stock or phased out, or will be arriving soon. Salsify can also deliver media such as product training videos. Other uses include creation of store-specific product cards with pricing information and other data that can be printed out at the store, as well as tracking store assets such as fixtures and TVs, where mall stores are located within shopping centers, and total store square footage.



“The biggest appeal of Salisfy is that it’s a blank slate,” Steube commented on the solution’s versatility. “It replaces spreadsheets and online documents. Today, it’s how we onboard products for the site and stores.”



When a new item is created in the SAP inventory distribution system, a workflow alert is created to fill out information such as price, department, description, digital assets, etc. in Salsify. When Marbles first used Salsify to populate product information on its new e-commerce site, the retailer was able to collect two-thirds of the data it needed from suppliers within 48 hours and saved weeks of time gathering and inputting information.



More recent developments with Salsify include a mobile app that helps simplify the task of attending global trade shows and collecting information on potential new products for Marbles’ chief merchant.



“Our chief merchant formerly used spreadsheets,” said Steube. “Now with the app, he takes a picture and creates an item with basic product information. He can also record verbal commitments from vendors. Later on, he completes the entries to present proposed new merchandise to the product management group.”