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"The Timberland Atomium has become a central hub for telling our brand and product stories. Combining literally dozens of printed catalogues across the Timberland footwear and apparel ranges in multiple languages it represents a massive saving on printed material as well as reducing users time in accessing and managing product, sales and marketing information." - European Training Manager

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Launch date: January 2006.
Impact on brochure/workbook: Reduced from 4 kinds to 1 kind.
User numbers: 975 globally.
User Type: Sales, Training, Customer Service, Range Planners, Retail, Agents and Distributors.
SKU Count: 2,300
Variants: The Retail Stick variant carries store buy data and visual merchandising guidelines throughout the season; The Range Planner allows season to season product planning and carry over to be determined; Sub-brands who have had their own version of Atomium include Smartwool, Mion and Go-Lite.

Timberland is a global brand leader in the design, manufacture and retailing of footwear and apparel. The famous Yellow Boot epitomises the company's commitment to quality and innovation using advanced design technologies and manufacturing processes.

In co-publishing the Atomium Interactive Product Guide the Hark account team support Timberland's global sales, marketing, business development, customer service and training teams with accurate and up to date information on all footwear and apparel products, technologies and marketing initiatives.

The project

Since its' launch in January 2006 at the International Sales Conference in Sorrento, Italy the Timberland Interactive Product guide has become a central hub for the Timberland brand and product stories.

In its' first phase the IPG was designed for use by sales, business-development and customer support teams providing them with language-specific comprehensive product information for the next season's line.

During 2006 the take up of the IPG spread from Europe to include Asia and the Americas and extended to cover Timberland sub-brands within the Outdoor Group such as Smartwool, Go-lite and Mion.


Widening usage

During 2007 the IPG extended its' relevance to job functions in product planning and retail with the development and deployment of range planning, range merchandising and shop planning functions.>

These build on the comprehensive and accurate nature of the data housed in the Atomium product database, the ability to select different views on the information, for example by colour or category, and ultimately to export the selections in to Microsoft Office applications for further modeling and reporting.

The intuitive way the IPG works and the simplicity of working with the product images and associated information have saved people hours if not days of repetitive work organizing and manipulating data.

Whether their job function is line planning, channel sales, customer service, store merchandising or retail training the IPG is delivering real impact in improving business processes and customer relations.

Timberland five USB sticks

Timberland IPG USB sticks

Internal champion

The fantastic rise in usage is in no small part due to the European Training Manager who originally recognised the need for this kind of media in the business. Having gauged the initial response, a successful implementtaion has been helped by ongoing feedback and bench marking the feedback from the original users. The guide is now recognised across all business units of the Timberland brand and sub brands.

"The IPG does the job of combining literally dozens of printed catalogues across the Timberland footwear and apparel ranges in multiple languages representing a massive saving on printed material."

For Timberland the Interactive Product Guide is an innovative yet practical use of technology and represents an expression of a broader company-wide culture in Timberland of "making it better".