Simplifying product management with over 10,000 product configurations

The Challenge 

As TCMM’s business scaled, their platform architecture struggled to keep pace. Product management became increasingly complex, while the business demanded a faster time-to-market.  

Their old platform managed a large proportion of their brand portfolio, each with its own product set, variants, and pricing. As the product offering grew, there was more variety for customers, but to the detriment of TCMM and its internal operations. Scaling their business became tougher, took longer, and cost more. New products meant new assets for the configurator, generated in multiple colour variants, slat sizes, and styles. Adopting new marketing and ecommerce tools coming onto the market became complicated and required a hefty investment when product data became a requirement.  

Development was needed for each new product being added onto the site, alongside an intricate build-out of the product within their CMS. This was acceptable when TCMM started its journey as a challenger brand, with a small product offering. But as their business and product range grew, their platform became a limiter rather than an enabler of growth. 

The Solution  

We architected a future-facing ecommerce platform from the ground up that would help TCMM scale their business in the right way – with Struct PIM at the heart of the platform to drive product simplicity. true normalised various product datasets across multiple sources into a single, coherent product set within Struct PIM.  

Struct PIM was able to handle the complexities of window shutter configuration dependencies and logic seamlessly, scaling to manage over 10,000 product options across products easily. As well as this, Struct PIM is connected to TCMM’s websites, ERP, content recommendations platform, and ecommerce tools to create one smooth process. With TCMM’s ever-expanding portfolio, Struct and Umbraco are the perfect combination to assist with the continued expansion of TCMM, from the ease of being able to set up new product structures and brands in Struct with just a few clicks, to the flexibility of sharing attributes between brands. 

Struct makes these transitions work seamlessly. From configuration and pricing to promotions and delivery - every step now works together, delivering speed, accuracy, and a better buying experience, with Struct PIM at the heart. 

Launching new products used to require weeks of effort and planning, with support from true developers to deploy product configuration changes. And even when product setup did not require a developer’s time, an in-depth knowledge of the system was a prerequisite to managing most of the product configuration.  

Now, TCMM can manage all the configuration in-house, and this can be achieved within hours in a completely self-sufficient manner. If development time is necessary to introduce a complex product type, it takes >50% less effort and time to achieve.