Timberland's weekly product launch capacity goes from 50 to over 1,000

Timberland improves e-commerce production efficiency by a factor of 20

While 5 of VF’s brands are taking advantage of dipp’s platform, one truly stands out for its ability to maximize efficiency when it comes to visual production for their e-commerce operations.

Timberland, the legendary boot brand under the VF Corporation, has over 1,000 products selling in the Taiwan market. Every week, a team of 3 designers must launch, relaunch or update over 50 products. Using the brand’s iconic image to its advantage, the team at 91APP was able to set up a production process that would improve their efficiency by 20x.

Before dipp

Prior to adopting dipp as a visual solution, Timberland’s production team had a unique photoshop file for each product type and each layout type. As you can imagine, this many PSD files for over 1,000 products can quickly become nearly impossible to manage. Add on top of all that the product photography and manual copying and pasting of smart objects from previous months, quarters and years, you wind up with a very tangled operation that only tenured teammates can navigate through it. 

Timberland’s operation was handles by 3 such designers and they were expected to churn out 50 products every week. Don’t be fooled, this is already a very impressive amount of work. 

Working with dipp

We started by taking a good look at everything the Timberland team has done over the past year. We found quite a few composition patterns in their work and were able to consolidate a lot of their designs into one layout. As far as translating requests from the marketing team via a complex excel doc, the team has adopted a much simpler spreadsheet format. So simple, in fact, it can be directly uploaded to dipp’s platform to produce visuals without requiring designers time and efforts.

In the end we were able have set up a single set of design templates for all Timberland’s needs, like thumbnails, product description pages (PDPs), sizing charts and other frequently used layouts. After showing the Timberland team around our platform, onboarding and setting some KPIs, the Timberland team got to work.

The new process

After almost a year of working and refining the new design process, they’ve been able to create PDPs, thumbnails and the rest using our spreadsheet to image process. Their ability to include non-designer teammates into the process has cut down the design team’s workload by a factor of 3 and on top of that, they were able to launch products in 1 day, instead of 7. All these improvements have combined for an over 20x boost in their workflow. 

Thumbnails with model photography and all required logos and labels are automatically populated via a spreadsheet

 

Product description images (lorikeets as they are called on Lazada) are automatically cropped according to guides and layout rules.

 

Sizing charts including technical drawings of items can also be automated using a spreadsheet. 

Conclusion

Now a year and 3 additional VF Corporation brands later, the process has become standardized and scalable not only for the brands mentioned, but for all brands managed by 91APP. Timberland seeing a 20 times improvement in their overall creative operational efficiency is not simply because of dipp’s platform. There is a good deal of production process adjustments as well as organizational changes that must take place before introducing the platform as part of the process.