How Successful Brands Organise Content for Product Ranges

Your content production teams are all working towards the same goal: getting the range content-ready on time.

But with pressing deadlines, assets being passed between different teams, and other distractions, it can be difficult to know how close your range is to going live with the content it needs.

Because the range is the reason for everything you produce, we believe a visual representation of the range should sit at the centre of all content production efforts. Whatever stage of production content for each product is at, at a glance you’ll know who’s involved in the process, how long it should take, and what the deliverables are.

How to organise your product range with spreadsheets

Firstly, you need to extract your product range, which will serve as the foundation for everything. The fields in your product range will likely be dictated by a PIM (Product Information Management) or PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) system. But you’ll want to be sure to exclude any non-essential fields from the output because they just add noise.

Decide with your team which essential fields you need, for example:

• Product/Colour Unique ID
• Categorisation
• Name/Description
• Season
• Launch week
• Drop
• Intake Week
• Stock level
• Investment level/key driver
• CAD imagery
• Barcodes (size level if possible)

How you organise your product range makes an enormous difference to your teams’ ability to work together effectively. The information you hold on your product range needs to be as granular as your e-commerce site product detail pages (PDP).

This might mean organising it at the colour level, not the style level. For example, a style called Backless Swimsuit could come in 4 different colours: red, blue, green and black. In this case, your product range will need 4 rows (1 for each colour), because you’ll need to shoot and produce content for each. If you don’t do this, you won’t be able to accurately report on or track content availability.

With processes set up to thoroughly document your product range, and all your range data in one place, your content production teams are teed up to shoot all styles, colours, and other details.

Want more tips like this? Download our free high-volume content production handbook to power up your toolkit, from production planning to post-production, we covered it all in the handbook.