Product data nobody can actually build on

The problem

The catalogue existed, but only as layout. A specification sat in a table cell because that is where it fit. A variant was implied by a footnote. Units were written however the page had room that day. None of it could be queried, filtered, priced or synced, because none of it was structured as data in the first place. Building a storefront on top of that would have meant building on sand, and no amount of front-end work would have hidden it.

What we built

• Worked outward from the print catalogue and the ERP to a real attribute model, deciding what was genuinely a product and what was a variant of one
• Normalised specifications and units, so that two products described by different people a decade apart became comparable
• Modelled the attributes customers actually filter and search on, rather than the ones that happened to get printed
• Made the model the shared source of truth, so the storefront, catalogue search and ERP agree instead of each holding its own version
• Set it up so a new product is entered once, as data, and appears everywhere it belongs

Result

• A print document became a queryable product data model
• The ecommerce store runs on structured data rather than transcribed pages
• New products are entered once instead of maintained in several places