Gert Snel
Gert Snel Interiors, for many years, has been offering an extensive and extremely varied range of unique products from all over the world. Their versatile and extensive collection offers inspiration to retailers, hospitality entrepeneurs and interior designers. Gert Snels continued search for items around the world, from varnished wood to patinated copper, from trinket to eye-catcher, results in an extensive collection of furniture and decorations unlike any other.
Challenge
For years, Gert Snel Interiors has offered an extensive and extremely varied range of unique home furnishing items from all over the world. But how do you ensure that a company with a constantly changing range of more than 25000 products uses the right photography on every platform or system used. Without too much handiwork involved.
Gert Snel has a public website where the collection is shown, a B2B webshop for customers behind a login, an order app for customers in the physical store in the Netherlands, a public webshop for B2B and B2C in the Czech Republic and the ERP system Exact Globe+ where all the product management takes place.
Keeping up with images manually on current platforms was already not doable. With the growth Gert Snel is making, even more systems and platforms would be added in the near future and then the problem would be incalculable.
Even though Exact Globe+ is the basis of all product information it offers no capabilities for smart management of product photography. So this required a smart and creative solution.
Solution
We developed the GS Mediabank, an easy-to-use system that stores all product photos centrally. At this central location, a simple drag and drop function uploads the photos to the server.
The content administrator has the ability to configure different versions of the photos so that each platform receives the photos in the correct way. For example, the configuration can automatically make the background transparent. They can set the dimensions of the image as well as the type of file format. But also the background color can be adjusted and the desired padding around the image.
After uploading, the images are queued to be processed based on all configurations. This of course happens in the background so the user does not have to wait for it. After processing the images, the GS media database has the ability to signal external systems that there are new images of a product. In this way, the platforms used can update the photography in real time. Of course, it is also possible to use the API to retrieve the photos.
Result
The manual labor dropped with 80% on photo management and all platforms always have the correct images in their database. For Gert Snel, good imagery is the key to making sales. And even though they have a daily changing range of products, it is no longer a problem to immediately provide all platforms with the right pictures.
