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Musco Foods is an importer and distributor of European food. They source from over 200 brands across Europe and sell their products to independent retailers and grocers from Boston to Philadelphia.
They’ve been a Plytix client since 2018, so we spoke with Sabina, their Head of Marketing, to find out how Plytix has allowed them to share products with their B2B retail partners in a way that builds trust (and sales).
Before Plytix, Sabina and the sales team were stuck creating product sheets by hand
“Before Plytix, we kept our product information in three places: our website backend, our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, and the PDFs we shared with retail partners,” Sabina told us. But it wasn’t unusual for prices, ingredient lists, and other key information to be entered differently in all three.
“As a B2B company, we need to be able to get our product lists into the hands of our retail partners (mostly small delis or mom-and-pop shops), so they have everything they need to decide what to stock. But putting together product sheets by hand was taking up most of my time. And not only mine. Our sales reps would be on the road, sat up late at night adjusting product sheets and price lists for their clients,” Sabina explained.
“These are small, legacy businesses. They do everything themselves. Our sales reps literally get in the car and drive out to see them. So if they ask us for allergen details and we don’t have them in our product sheet at that moment, they’ll move on, and we’ll lose the sale. They’re not going to wait around for us to track down that information.”
As their product portfolio grew to a fluctuating 17,000 active products, this problem only got worse. “I could see the impact it was having on our partners and our sales,” Sabina said. “If stocking our products isn’t easy, they won’t come back to us, no matter how great the products we’re importing are.”
But Sabina was a one-woman show. “I just didn’t have the time to manage and share our product information in the way we needed to maintain trust and a good relationship with our retail partners, or to the standard I wanted. So it was a no-brainer to invest in a solution that could help me manage and distribute our product content.”
Digitalizing product catalogs with Plytix has saved Sabina 10 hours a week
“Now we use Brand Portals for everything,” Sabina told us. Brand Portals are branded digital catalogs auto-filled with products and product information from Plytix.
“Reps can set one up for individual clients or product lines. They take an iPad on the road with them, so they can easily toggle between Portals to show the right clients the right products,” Sabina explained. “If an item becomes discontinued, you can just unselect it, and it won’t appear in the catalog.” Not only has no longer having to recreate product sheets from scratch saved them time, but because Brand Portals pull information directly from Plytix, they know it's always up-to-date.
“I’m saving at least 10 hours a week now that I don’t have to create catalogs manually.”
Having their product information centralized and organized also allowed Musco Foods to move forward with two digital projects that had been in the pipeline. “We finally launched a new website to showcase our products. Before, it was too big a job. It would have taken months to track down all our products and photos to add to the website. With Plytix, we finally had everything we needed, ready and organized in one place,” Sabina told us.
“We also built a unique order entry system so our sales reps can access real-time information on the road and put in orders directly. Had we not centralized our information in the PIM, this project would have been impossible to manage. But as it was, we could literally drop all of our product information, properly structured, with images, straight into the new system.”
Choosing the right PIM system
“What really won me over about Plytix was the Brand Portals feature. I didn’t even know features like this existed. But realizing once we had a central source of truth for our products, we could create digital catalogs in a few clicks was inspiring; it was exactly what we needed to stop manually creating product data sheets which was sucking so much of mine and the sales reps time,” Sabina told us.
Coming from a marketing background, Sabina was also worried about not having the technical skills to make the most of a PIM. “But that hasn’t been the case at all. In fact, Plytix imported and organized our product information for us! I’m on Plytix all day, every day, without any problems.“
Sabina’s take: The best thing about Plytix
“Having Plytix as a central source of truth helped us to be a better partner during the pandemic. As a B2B business, you need to go above and beyond to build trust with your partners, and we could. The COVID-19 pandemic forced many smaller retailers to move online, and using Plytix, we were able to support them,” Sabina told us.
“Some partners were trying to sell on sales channels like Amazon. Others wanted their customers to be able to click and collect,” Sabina explained. “But, for smaller stores, the technology was intimidating, and often, the information they needed to sell their produce digitally wasn’t easily available.”
With Plytix, Musco Foods had all the detailed descriptions and photos their clients needed to create rich ecommerce product listings ready and waiting. “I could send them over the data, the descriptions, the images, everything they needed to set up their online stores in literally ten minutes,” Sabina told us.
“Now, we can use our product information to allow brick-and-mortar stores to power in-store displays and enable ecommerce clients to sell online. As a result, our portfolio has grown, and we couldn’t be happier!”
Musco Food’s results with Plytix
- Saved 10 hours a week spent creating and updating product sheets
- Supported their partners through the COVID-19 pandemic, equipping them with the right product information to sell online
- Built trust and stronger relationships with their B2B retail partners through better product information and increased support
- Launched a new website and order entry system, stocking them with data and assets from Plytix
