Luxury childrenswear retailer Childsplay Clothing is driving international growth with a solution from Product Information Management (PIM) and Product Experience Management (PXM) company Akeneo.
Launched in 1990, Childsplay Clothing brings the very latest designer wear for new-borns, juniors and teenagers to market quickly for its thriving fashion-conscious client base. An early pioneer of influencer marketing, the business has successfully built a loyal client following across the UK, US and Middle East. With ambitious plans to scale operations in these markets, it identified the need to migrate from a custom build platform to the Shopify platform and implement Akeneo’s PIM to centralise all product information across its sales channels.
In addition to its core ecommerce business, Childsplay Clothing is successfully driving social sales across its Instagram community of over 1.6 million followers and is rapidly expanding its operations across key marketplace platforms. Using Akeneo’s PIM enables the business to consolidate all product data centrally on one platform, unifying its product record and ensuring everyone in the team has access to a standard set of product information tools to enrich data.
Azeem Chowdhury, Digital Lead at Childsplay Clothing, commented: “We represent renowned fashion brands like Fendi, Versace, and Burberry, and launching new season collections quickly is essential for us. Our trendy customers depend on us to provide them with early access to the latest designs. Any delays in making products available result in decreased value. To ensure our systems can keep up with our growing business, we migrated to Shopify and adopted Akeneo. Akeneo offers a range of options to innovate our business processes and its open platform allows us to implement pioneering techniques for increased efficiency.
“Currently, we utilise ChatGPT and AI functionality to retrieve data on empty product sets. This data is exported to Akeneo’s PIM, enhancing the speed and accuracy of product launches. Product data plays a vital role in bringing our website to life and delivering a seamless customer experience. Additionally, Akeneo enables us to create special attributes for specific products. For bespoke clients, we implement a drop ship model, and using the PIM system, we can prominently display specific delivery times to customers.”
With over 10,000 new SKUs per season and two collections a year, Childsplay is driving efficiencies in product lifecycle management and accelerating speed to market as the teams use Akeneo PIM to enrich product data at the point of order placement, speeding up product information processes and contributing to more consistent, accurate product data.
Childsplay Clothing is also using Shopify Markets and Akeneo to localise pricing for international markets while maintaining product consistency.
James Barlow, Director UK&I at Akeneo, said: “Childsplay Clothing is such a dyanimc brand. It understands the needs and desires of their customers so well and has built its business around delivering to the highest standards. Product experience is at the core of the brand’s engagement with its customers and it is building a progressive international retail model that remains true to the brand’s heritage.”
