Private label products represent a crucial challenge for retailers, who must constantly find new, innovative, quality products to differentiate themselves from the competition and build customer loyalty. To develop and source these private label products from manufacturers, and given the increasing complexity of the processes, retail buyers are increasingly turning to integrated IT solutions from design to marketing.
Private labels have been a great revolution in the retail sector over the last ten years. Previously considered as simple loss-leader products, these own-brand products are now considered as premium choices, offering retailers great freedom to differentiate themselves while offering quality products that meet the specific requirements of consumers (for example, organic products, local and short-distance products, wellness products, or even GMO-free or gluten-free products…).
The multiplication of available products, and the growing share of private label sales in recent years, have made it a highly strategic, but increasingly complex, pillar for retailers. Faced with increasingly cumbersome processes, the entire sector has not yet made the switch to integrated digital solutions, with some retailers continuing to work with simple Excel files from one end of the private label product marketing process to the other. This is a tedious methodology, which does not allow for the processing of large volumes, and which leads to significant risks of data entry errors.
This is a real anachronism when you consider the increasing complexity of private label sourcing and the multiplication of specifications required, whether for the product itself (nutritional elements, allergens, information on ingredients, etc.) or for its packaging (recyclability). Not to mention the fact that many players, such as product managers, packaging managers, marketing managers, quality managers, or CSR managers, are now involved in the sourcing process and need collaborative tools.-
Hence the importance of being able to rely on software suites that enable 360° management of the entire sourcing process, from the call for tenders to marketing. As Claire Bui, Product Manager at Trace One, the world leader in bringing together retailers and manufacturers, points out, there is a growing need to “have an integrated solution that centralizes everything, particularly by covering the upstream phases of development.
