SPORT 2000 Automates Asset Migrations With MediaFlows

ABOUT

SPORT 2000: European Leader in Sportswear E-commerce

SPORT 2000 Germany is a community of sports retail experts based in Mainhausen, Germany that offers leading sports brands in more than 1,500 stores. The company also operates an extensive e-commerce shop, providing household and exclusive brand sporting goods online.

As a leading European sportswear retailer, SPORT 2000 needs to ensure its online customers are getting the most up-to-date and highest-quality product images and information from SPORT 2000’s suite of partner brands on its e-commerce platform. It was critical to automate this process in order to optimize time-to-market and stay competitive. SPORT 2000 chose Cloudinary Assets as its DAM and seamlessly migrated 1.4 million existing assets from their prior storage system into Cloudinary, saving hours of high-touch work and ensuring an industry-best visual commerce experience.

THE CHALLENGE

Keeping Up With the Latest and Greatest Images

For large e-commerce companies like SPORT 2000, having a high-quality and up-to-date catalog of available products is a must-have. And yet, this seemingly simple task is difficult without a robust and well-managed process for linking images between a digital asset management (DAM) solution and a product information management (PIM) system.

For SPORT 2000, that meant finding an in-house, efficient, low-code way to streamline its asset workflow between the Cloudinary DAM and Akeneo PIM system. Keeping images updated across Cloudinary and Akeneo allows SPORT 2000 to deliver top-quality visuals to merchandise its products.

“Having a seamless and efficient process for linking images and assets between Cloudinary and our Akeneo PIM system is crucial,” says Tobias Stiedl, Online Marketing Manager at SPORT 2000.

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

Automating the Link From Production to Live On Site

With Cloudinary Assets as its DAM, it made sense for SPORT 2000 to add MediaFlows, Cloudinary’s low-code solution for automating visual media workflows, to customize its visual asset workflow needs. Using the out-of-the-box Akeneo integration in MediaFlows, which offers more flexibility than a traditional integration, SPORT 2000 customized a workflow to automatically migrate assets and product information in real-time from their partner brands into Cloudinary as new products and collections launch. This new orchestration solution enabled Sport 2000 to automatically add product images from Cloudinary to Akeneo Asset Manager and link the image variations to the appropriate product. To date, this team of non-developer business users manage this process in MediaFlows using a drag-and-drop UI without concern for technical requirements such as deployment or DevOps.

“From the moment we integrated Assets and MediaFlows into our IT stack, we were convinced by its user-friendly interface and intuitive functionalities,” shares Stiedl. “The platform allows us to effortlessly create and manage custom workflows. It has significantly reduced the time and effort required to keep our online store up-to-date with the latest product images.”

Beyond saving time and resources, MediaFlows has also offered SPORT 2000 greater visibility into its asset management operations. “One of the standout features of MediaFlows is its exceptional logfile system, which offers valuable insights into the status of image links and any potential issues. This level of transparency and monitoring has been instrumental in ensuring a smooth and error-free operation.”

THE RESULTS

A Rapidly Growing Empire

MediaFlows and Cloudinary Assets have changed the quality and speed of SPORT 2000’s media management processes. The SPORT 2000 team are able to get to market quicker with new products, and Stiedl has gotten back valuable time to focus on higher-value initiatives, rather than copying and pasting links from one system to another. To date, they’ve linked 1.4 million assets between Akeneo and Cloudinary.

SPORT 2000’s parent company ANWR saw the value of MediaFlows and implemented the same workflows to another subsidiary: Schuhe.de. ANWR immediately migrated over 3.5 million assets into its Cloudinary DAM to streamline and automate the asset management process for Schuhe.de. Today, ANWR has linked over 4 million assets.

By leveraging MediaFlows, SPORT 2000 was able to reap all the benefits of a custom integration without the costly overhead of securing additional developer resources.

“We are delighted to have Assets and MediaFlows as part of our stack,” says Stiedl. “It has significantly improved our workflow efficiency, saving us time, resources, and headaches. Thank you, MediaFlows team, for creating such a good product!”

About MediaFlows by Cloudinary

MediaFlows offers a low-code development environment for building and automating visual media-related workflows. MediaFlows provides drag-and-drop access to Cloudinary APIs, the ability to automate workflows within Cloudinary DAM, out-of-the-box integrations with platforms like Shopify and Akeneo, and pre-built templates and logic built specifically to manage, edit, and connect visual media at scale.