Max Hauer is the founder of Svelte Brands – an operator of multiple E-commerce brands focused on fashion and beauty.

The trick for any modern E-Commerce company is managing product data, and lot’s of it.

It’s not as simple as maintaining a spreadsheet of your products — each product can be sold through various channels that may require a different set of data for the same product, including unique item numbers and SKUs.

Max was struggling to find the right platform to manage Svelte’s product data:

We faced an existential challenge. How can we store, manage and update large numbers of products? How can we manage workflows of creating, copywriting, building product data for each product?

Max turned to Knack to create a custom solution that simplified the entire process.

The E-commerce Challenge

A big component of running a successful E-Commerce business is the ability to manage product data, maintain a clean database of sku’s, and eliminate cross-contamination of data with duplicate information from suppliers.

Many suppliers will carry the same products but use variable product data – this is where it becomes a real challenge.

“What was even more challenging was the fact that each of our products is sold and marketed on our various websites, as well as our retail stores,” Max explained. “Each of these channels requires a different set of data for the same product including unique item numbers and SKUs. And after all these data points are created, we needed to keep track of which product appears where and what prices they are sold.”

Clearly a giant effort is needed for simply managing the data. While Excel could be an option to store some data it fails to provide any further benefits: it requires manual updates for almost every almost every activity, collaboration and approvals are cumbersome, and there’s no easy path to migrate data to e-commerce sites.

The Knack Solution: a custom product database

Max knew that Svelte Brands required a more robust and customizable solution to manage product data and workflow. Fortunately he found Knack and immediately got to work building his own database application from scratch.

Knack saved our lives (I mean our business)! Knack allowed us to build an app in no time flat to solve all these problems,” says Max.

Max focused on combining multiple databases into a single web-based application that streamlined workflow and increased productivity.

Knack’s built-in features gave him an immediate toolset to build out his app. He also used that process to simplify his business workflows.

Knack’s standard features and formulas are designed to cover almost every single requirement we ever wanted. We used these features to “think simple” and to make things work in a consistent way throughout our application”, Max explains.

Flexibility is key

A major advantage of a database platform like Knack over specific software is the flexibility to modify your app whenever and however you need.

The ease and simplicity of making updates and modifications with Knack means our app constantly evolves with our needs.

Knack has enabled Max to create additional solutions for managing marketing and copywriting processes among his staff.

Knack rocks!

Max has build an amazing online database app with Knack. We’ll let him sum up his experience:

You guys rock. The support and service is superb as well. Keep up the good work. I don’t think there’s anything like Knack out there.

Thanks Max, we don’t either!