Telescope's PIM and DAM drive Symphony's printed Spec Guides and online Product eDirectory from one source, giving 2,400+ kitchen designers accurate product data in print and online.
INTRODUCTION
Most manufacturers live with a quiet, expensive problem: their printed product catalogues and their online product information don't quite match.
A price changes, the website updates, the printed guide doesn't, and a retailer ends up quoting a figure that was right last quarter. Multiply that across a large range and several brands, and keeping everything straight becomes a job in itself.
Symphony doesn’t have that problem. One of the UK’s largest privately owned kitchen and bedroom manufacturers, it hands more than 2,400 kitchen designers live product information every day through the Symphony Product eDirectory, an online directory Telescope built for it, where retailers browse ranges, check current prices and build orders themselves.
Alongside it sit Symphony’s printed guides, and the two never disagree, because every guide, printed or online, is drawn from a single live source of product data. Change it once, and it is right everywhere. That source is our product information management and digital asset management system, our PIM and DAM.
2,400+ retailers. One live source of data.
Print and online, always in step.
WHY THE PIM AND DAM ARE DIFFERENT: THE SYSTEM AND THE STUDIO TOGETHER
Plenty of suppliers will sell you a piece of product data software. What Telescope offers is the system and the studio together: the PIM and DAM hold all of a client’s product data and assets in one place, and the same creative team that manages that data also produces the brochures, guides and campaigns that draw on it.
So a client isn’t handed a tool and left to make it work. It gets the data managed, the print and digital driven from it, and the creative produced, all from one supplier who understands the whole picture. For Symphony, that is what turns a large, constantly changing product range into something manageable.
A DIGITAL OPTION, ADDED WITHOUT DISTURBING THE PRINT
Around 2020, we developed the Symphony Product eDirectory, powered by our PIM and DAM, and designed and built the web app that sits on top of it. All of Symphony’s product data, dimensions, specifications, options, imagery and prices, live in one place, and the eDirectory draws directly from it, so a retailer browsing online is always looking at current information. The Spec Builder lets a user choose a range, then a colour and finish, and narrows the available products accordingly, so nobody specifies something that cannot be supplied. From there they can build an order, review it in a basket and generate an order for reference. What began as a way to check prices has become a tool retailers use day to day.
THE EDIRECTORY: LIVE PRICES, SELF-SERVICE ORDERING, ALWAYS CURRENT
For years, Symphony’s product references took the form of printed guides, substantial documents running to 200 pages or more, and those printed references remain something its customers value today. Symphony wanted to add a digital option alongside them, without either format falling out of step with the other, across a growing family of brands.
ONE DATABASE, EVERY GUIDE CORRECT, PRINT AND ONLINE
The same system drives Symphony’s printed Spec Guides. These are produced from the live data through a smart workflow, so the current range flows straight onto the printed page rather than being rebuilt by hand. Print and digital become two equal ways into one set of information. For a manufacturer with a large range across many brands, that is difficult to achieve any other way, and it is the clearest example of what our PIM and DAM offering does.
2,400+ users, and growing brand by brand
The eDirectory has grown quickly, with new brands and functionality added year on year, and now serves more than 2,400 users, a number that keeps rising as Symphony brings further brands on board. Those brands show the scale of what it offers: alongside its own ranges, including Milano, Linear, Gallery and Freedom, the directory carries kitchens created for well-known names including Laura Ashley, and multiple retailer partners. Symphony’s reach into recognisable retail brands is considerable, and the eDirectory puts it all in front of the right retailers in one place.
The volume behind this is considerable. In a typical year we produce between 30 and 40 brochures, spec guides and price guides for Symphony, totalling at least 3,600 pages of content, and we support the range in other areas too, including adverts, display, labels, choice sheets, range cards and range selectors.
WE BUILT THE PLATFORM, NOT JUST THE DATA
App development is not the first thing people associate with Telescope, but we designed and built the eDirectory web app ourselves, on top of the PIM and DAM behind it, taking the project from product data right through to a working digital tool that thousands of users depend on.
PRINT STAYS CORE, AND SUSTAINABLE
Print remains core to Symphony’s offering and to what we do. Many customers prefer a reference they can hold, and the printed Spec Guides serve that need, produced from the same data as the online directory.
Symphony has a strong focus on sustainability across its manufacturing, and the guides we produce sit within that, printed on carbon balanced stock. The digital option adds flexibility rather than replacing print: retailers who want live, searchable information have it, and those who want a printed guide have that too, both from one source.
WHAT IT DELIVERS FOR SYMPHONY
One accurate source of product data behind every guide, a choice of formats for retailers, each as current as the other, a self-service tool used by more than 2,400 people, and a system built to grow, brand by brand, as its business does.
IN THEIR WORDS
"The eDirectory gives our retailers live product data, supporting information and pricing at their fingertips, and they can create a product list for a kitchen design themselves. It sits alongside our printed specification guides, so customers can choose whichever suits them, and it has saved our team a great deal of time on the queries and checks we used to handle manually.
Telescope has been a partner to us for two decades. They understand our brands and our business, and the way they manage our product data means everything we produce, in print and online, stays accurate and consistent."
Robert Newton, head of marketing, Symphony
COMMON QUESTIONS ABOUT THE SYMPHONY PRODUCT eDIRECTORY
What is the Symphony Product eDirectory?
It is an online product directory that gives kitchen retailers live access to Symphony’s ranges, options and prices, with a Spec Builder that lets them narrow products by range and finish and build an order. Telescope designed and built it, powered by our PIM and DAM.
How can a printed guide and an online directory stay perfectly in step?
Both are fed from the same source. Symphony’s product information is held in Telescope’s PIM and DAM; the eDirectory draws from it directly, and the printed Spec Guides are generated from the same data through a smart workflow, so both reflect the current range.
Does the eDirectory replace Symphony’s printed guides?
No. Printed guides remain a core part of Symphony’s offering, because many customers prefer a reference they can hold. The eDirectory is a digital option alongside them, and because both come from the same database, retailers can choose whichever format suits them.