How Bol.com published the biggest Holiday Toys Catalog with Relayter

A customer story about Bol.com with Sanne Braams.

Bol.com - Ahold Delhaize

As part of Ahold Delhaize, Bol.com is the number one online retailer in the BeNeLux area with a revenue of more than 3 billion euros.

Bol.com launched as an online bookseller in 1999. Since then it has expanded to offer around 11 million products in categories such as music, film, electronics, toys, jewelry, watches, baby products, gardening and DIY. In 2011 it launched a marketplace that gives access to products from other retailers, including second-hand goods.

Bol-com logo for Relayter
Sanne Braams marketing promotions specialist Bol-com for Relayter

“We collaborate with over 100 colleagues on Bol.com's annual toys catalog: Het Grote Speelgoedboek. With Relayter we have the possibility to work on the catalog with several people and departments at the same time. The user-friendly interface ensures that everyone can easily contribute to a book of no less than 196 pages."

Sanne Braams – Sr. Marketing Promotions Specialist

The Challenge

The Toys department is huge, but it also resides in a heavily competitive market. All competitors battle for consumer attention in one particular season, the Holidays.

Besides the marketing dynamics, there is an organizational component to consider. How to let over 100 colleagues work together on a single marketing project. And if that is not enough, we have to think about thousands of products. Going from data to a correct design layout, is not an easy task.

Bol.com needed a platform to collaborate, not only among colleagues, but also with their marketing production agency CMN. The complete sum of these challenges called for an outstanding SaaS platform to manage it all.

The Solution

Relayter became the central project hub. Giving Bol.com the ability to manage all product data, design files and proofing workflows in one place.

With Relayter, Bol.com was able to centralize the setup of product content and assets, specifically for this project. With an easy-to-use interface, the right product specialists could manage their category data on time.

The project lead was able to setup the perfect workflow to monitor project progress. After data and template setup, Bol.com could generate automatic layouts. The agency could then process the work into custom designs. After which specific roles could review and proof work at the right time. This workflow created a feedback loop until all content was perfect and on-brand.

Limitless Creativity with Automated Design workflows

The creativity used in Bol.com’s Big Toy Book is amazing. From augmented reality games to stickers and QR-codes. This was made possible by design automation. Relayter’s technology to automatically generate content, meant Bol.com could focus more resources on the important creative content.

Layout and pagination planning were done in the project overview. After layout planning from the product category managers, automated designs were generated. Product titles, descriptions, images and other assets were automatically placed in the design files. The team was able to play around with layouts and product data until the automatic design engine of Relayter gave the needed results.

The agency was then able to pick-up InDesign files from the workflow and enrich them with custom creative content. Through clear defined workflow steps Bol.com was able to manage every aspect of the project. Keeping track of individual pages, product categories and final designs. Relayter provided Bol.com with the powerful tooling needed for an intensive collaboration between departments, data, colleagues and agency creatives.

How to automate publishing with Relayter

Manage campaign or project data by importing products and promotions. Set up smart design templates and create proofing workflows. Then streamline your complete marketing production with creative automations.

Automated design & publishing for Retail E-commerce

Relayter is a leading SaaS provider of omnichannel Automated Design and Proofing Workflow management within large marketing productions. Request a FREE DEMO from one of our Design Automation experts to discover why so many companies use Relayter.

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