Pura Vida Bracelets Modernizes Product Catalog with Lasernet
Founded in Costa Rica, Pura Vida Bracelets sells hand-crafted jewelry while providing sustainable jobs to artisans worldwide and raising awareness for charities with products that give back.
Pura Vida Bracelets was recently acquired by Vera Bradley, which uses Lasernet and is a current customer of Lasernet Distribution, a Formpipe partner.
The Challenge
Pura Vida Bracelets needed to be brought into the fold of Vera Bradley's recent e-commerce transformation. The Pura Vida team was impressed with the Vera Bradley catalogs that are created via Formpipe's Lasernet and wanted to create a new wholesale catalog – one that kept the same look and feel as the previous versions they had published, but created more efficiently with Lasernet.
Pura Vida's original catalog creations consisted of largely manual processes. Piecing all of their data together from a spreadsheet with no automation had been timely and laborious. Lasernet Distribution was given a tight deadline to create a new catalog – three to four weeks to create wireframes and data samples, with a deadline of two weeks for development and user testing, but the team was up for the challenge.
The Solution
There were numerous data source changes and multiple layers of sorting to work through in order to meet the customer's deadline, in addition to complex rules for determining which wireframe to use for each product type. The customer was using SharePoint to house the data.
The Lasernet Distribution team used an XML Transformer to get the Excel documents to work cleanly. There were two used for this project, broken down into two phases. Once there was a clean XML, the catalog could be created. The team then coded the order for each wireframe and manipulated patterns to set the business rules for building the catalog. The team used a web connection for SharePoint.
The Results
The catalog was successfully created, and the teams worked together to establish processes for this version and future Pura Vida catalogs.
While a catalog specifically for wholesale use was the original intent of this project, the Pura Vida team liked the outcome so much with Lasernet that they are now interested in a consumer-direct version. The customer was able to keep the new catalog on-brand, led by its marketing team.
For the future, the processes established during this project will make subsequent catalogs much easier, with automation and full transparency.
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