Customer
Green Sprouts, formerly i play, Inc., is an Asheville, North Carolina maker of baby and children's products, known for swim and sun wear, feeding gear, and natural, thoughtfully made goods for infants and toddlers. Since 2023 it has been part of O2C Brands.
Challenge
Like many growing product companies, the brand had accumulated its product information across a scattered mix of spreadsheets, tools, and platforms. Managing product content and digital assets that way was slow and error-prone, and it held the business back from moving quickly. The company needed to centralize all of that product information into a single, authoritative repository, one book of truth for every product, on a platform flexible enough to model a complex catalog and integrate with the systems the business already ran on.
But standing up a PIM was only the beginning. Product data is never finished: catalogs grow, the platform needs upgrades, the team needs to be able to work in it confidently, and the whole thing has to keep running through whatever the business goes through. In this case, that included a full company rebrand and, later, an acquisition, each of which could easily have disrupted the data operations underneath. The brand needed a partner who could build the foundation and then stay through all of it.
Solution
Lightning Jar brought specialized Pimcore expertise and a long-term, steady approach to the brand's product data.
A Pimcore PIM as the single source of truth. Starting in 2018, Lightning Jar partnered with i play, Inc. to design and stand up a Product Information Management platform on Pimcore, centralizing the brand's product content and digital assets into one authoritative repository in place of scattered spreadsheets and tools. The work moved from discovery and platform architecture across development, staging, and production, into the design of a Pimcore object model tailored to the brand's catalog.
Integrated with the systems the business runs on. The PIM was built to work with the brand's existing operational data, including analysis and alignment with its SAP data, along with a documented content hierarchy and data dictionary, so the single source of truth actually reflected how the business ran.
Team enablement. Rather than creating a black box only the vendor could touch, Lightning Jar trained the client's own team in Pimcore data architecture, so they could confidently manage and extend the platform themselves.
Upgrades and ongoing support. As the years went on, Lightning Jar kept the environment current and supported, including a Pimcore platform upgrade and ongoing support engagements, so the PIM stayed healthy and dependable.
Continuity through rebrand and acquisition. When i play, Inc. rebranded to Green Sprouts, the partnership continued without interruption. When O2C Brands acquired Green Sprouts in 2023, it continued again, this time expanding to help the new parent company bring the brand into its own systems: Lightning Jar developed the export and import scripts and executed the migration of Green Sprouts' product data (from item codes, suppliers, and country of origin to UPCs, tariff codes, color and size objects, and carton and dimensional data) from the Green Sprouts Pimcore instance into O2C's existing Pimcore environment, with QA at each step.
Results
A Pimcore PIM that has served as the single source of truth for the brand's product content and digital assets since 2018.
Product data integrated with the brand's operational systems, backed by a documented content hierarchy and data dictionary.
A client team enabled to work in Pimcore themselves, through hands-on data architecture training.
A platform kept current and dependable through upgrades and ongoing support.
A data partnership that held steady through a full rebrand and a change of ownership, continuing seamlessly from i play, Inc. to Green Sprouts to O2C Brands, including a clean migration of product data into the new parent company's Pimcore instance.