Perfectly Equipped for Further Growth Thanks to Pimcore

The Challenge

The expansive multichannel mail order company 7days Marc Staperfeld GmbH is one of the leading specialists for fashionable and innovative workwear. The company, which operates throughout Europe, sells its products via an online shop, newsletter, and catalogs. In order to be able to conveniently extract product data for its shop and print publications, 7days wanted a modern PIM system that could be expanded to include additional languages, products, countries, and sales channels as needed without any programming effort.

Publication Planning in Pimcore

1. Catalogs and page structure are created in Pimcore.

2. Items are assigned to pages from the tree using drag & drop.

3. For each item, a selection of stored images and texts can be made.

4. Finally, the export URL is generated in the desired language and price group.

Automated catalog creation in Adobe InDesign

1. The URL generated in Pimcore is inserted into the corresponding dialog in Adobe InDesign.

2. In InDesign, the data is displayed in a tabular view, known as the "palette."

3. Layout modules created with placeholders are saved in the InDesign library and filled with data using drag & drop, then placed in the document.

4. An unfilled and a filled library object: The green markings indicate that the data placed in the document is up to date.

5. Red markings, on the other hand, indicate changed data – these can be updated via a simple dialog box.

The Solution

To meet our client's requirements, we used the flexible open-source software platform Pimcore: The system is ideal for maintaining all data centrally and in a targeted manner and then exporting it. When expanding the product range or tapping into new sales markets, the 7days team can easily add new content and language variants for the various sales channels at any time. 

From Pimcore, the product data is imported into InDesign via EasyCatalog using a web interface and processed. For optimal publication planning, Blackbit has expanded its own Pimcore bundle for EasyCatalog export, making the assignment of products, variants, and images to individual chapters and pages more convenient and less time-consuming than publication planning in EasyCatalog itself. The InDesign templates created by Blackbit according to the customer's specifications enable 7days to design and publish catalogs easily and independently. The more automated print output and simplified mass changes (e.g., with CSV import) reduce manual effort and speed up catalog production. In addition to the interface for InDesign (print), we have implemented the desired export function for providing product data for the existing Magento shop.