Case Study: APG & Co
As home to some of Australia’s most long-standing brands, APG & Co (Sportscraft, SABA, JAG) celebrates their heritage. With over 50 years experience under their belt, APG & Co are resilient and built to last. They know the importance of being nimble and dynamic, and thrive on change.
Group Head of Technology, Carina Ton, understands the need to grow their digital business for the ever-evolving retail environment. Looking to expand upon their multi-channel strategy for their 3 brands, she knew the resourcing required to complete each new integration was going to be a stretch for their small, internal team.
“Operationally it became quite an overhead for us, not to just simply to do the development work for the integrations for each provider we wanted, but also to maintain that integration as well; to ensure all the information was correct, current, available to each of those providers.”
Not only did they have to consider the initial integration and ongoing maintenance, but also action any updates from the different channels, such as API updates and spec changes. And once that integration was built, they were committed – they weren’t about to throw weeks worth of development work out the window.
Running a light technical team inhouse, building out and managing 6 or 7 integrations across all 3 brands just wasn’t efficient and a good use of their time. Managing the flow of their data was an ongoing problem – they had to find a more robust way to handle it.
“We wanted to grow, and to explore and not be tied down, and that’s when we started exploring ways we could simplify our integration. One provider would allow us to manage those endpoints to our external providers in a much more uniform way – to allow us to adopt things quickly, pivot quickly if needed and give us the ability to try new things,” said Carina.
Carina reached out to Comestri to help her manage the data more effectively and efficiently.
“The Comestri solution allowed us to manage all of our integrations to our service providers and partners in a single place. It was very effective – with each provider you integrate with, they all have their own dashboards and portals. Having that one place to go is very convenient and very efficient for us.”
With a consolidated view of all their products, APG & Co could now further enrich each product for specific requirements each service provider requested. They can easily and quickly add promotional tags to boost rankings, ensure pricing is 100% accurate across all channels, and analyse their data in an aggregated view.
Carina’s team also benefited from a more streamlined process: “If we’ve got a process for setting up campaigns and promotions, we do it once, and everyone gets the same information.”
“The Comestri platform helped us get all that enriched data from our systems to whoever we were working with in the world.”
But the best part? Comestri has had a direct impact on their bottom line.
