Background
A corporate gifting company regularly created personalized product catalogues for their customers. The catalogues had to reflect customer preferences, company branding, and relevant product details.
The company stored product information (names, descriptions, and prices) in Excel sheets, while product images were scattered across multiple folders. To create catalogues, the team relied on manual design in Canva, a process that took 2–3 hours per catalogue. If a customer changed preferences, the team had to repeat the process from scratch, slowing down turnaround times and limiting scalability.
Problem / Challenge
The existing approach created multiple inefficiencies:
- Time-consuming process: Each catalogue required hours of manual work.
- Difficult updates: Any change in customer preference meant recreating catalogues from scratch.
- Fragmented data: Prices in Excel and images in folders led to errors and duplication.
- Barrier to scaling: Limited catalogue throughput per day restricted growth opportunities.
Solution
I built a custom catalogue management solution that streamlined the entire process from product selection to catalogue creation.
Key features included:
- Master catalogue: Centralized repository containing all products, complete with descriptions, prices, and images.
- Sub-catalogue generator: Ability to create customer-specific catalogues by applying search filters and preferences directly from the master catalogue.
- Quick updates: If customer preferences changed, the team simply adjusted filters and regenerated the catalogue — no need to start over.
- Mini-CRM functionality: The system stored customer interactions and catalogues, enabling future follow-ups and better relationship management.
Implementation Highlights
- Integrated Excel product data with image libraries into a single structured database.
- Designed a user-friendly interface to search, filter, and select products by customer preferences.
- Automated the catalogue design process so staff could generate polished, customer-ready catalogues instantly.
- Enabled exportable catalogue formats for sharing with clients.
Results / Impact
- Increased efficiency: Catalogue creation time dropped dramatically, enabling staff to generate more proposals per day.
- Faster turnaround: Clients received updated catalogues in minutes instead of hours.
- Scalability unlocked: The business could serve more clients and handle last-minute requests with ease.
- Enhanced customer engagement: Built-in follow-up features allowed the company to treat the system as a mini-CRM, strengthening client relationships.