“The gamble paid off: the project was launched in March, and with a minimum of support, the PDF was handed over to the printer on June 15.”
The company
Willemse France “Your garden’s heart” is a catalog sales company created in 1962. Specialized in seeds and plants, the brand is renowned among gardeners. Willemse France strengthens its visibility through its website, its catalogs, its private sales and its market place.
The problematic
Like all online merchants, Willemse France is facing time and budget constraints related to the production of its catalogs.
After nearly 10 years, the solution implemented with the help of J2S needed to be modernized.
Willemse France needed to find a way to be more proactive on the print channel in order to reach a new audience and win new markets.
Project implementation
J2S’s solution enabled Willemse France to easily create a completely revamped catalog within a few weeks. Connected to Willemse’s Product Information Management (PIM), the products are simply dragged and dropped into the flatplan. Most of the pages are almost ready to be published thanks to J2S’s layout automation engine. The graphic designers can easily adjust the page layout directly in InDesign.
The workflow follows the production of the publications through the page statuses in the proofreadings cycle. When the production is over, J2S’s platform automatically generates the High Definition PDF file for the print vendor. The next season edition can be created from this publication and updated automatically with the PIM data.
Anxious at the beginning because of very short deadlines, Willemse France’s team quickly learned how to use J2S’s platform to organize and produce their publications.
The relationship with the J2S’s team was pleasant and constructive, especially during the stressful beginning of the project.
The benefits of the J2S solution
A lot has changed in two months: from QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign, the team created new design guidelines to modernize the catalog. Willemse France even changed the print vendor!
The gamble paid off: the project was launched in March, and with a minimum of support, the PDF was handed over to the printer on June 15.
J2S Publish-In Suite solution is now connected to the database and the significant time savings expected will allow Willemse France to quickly adapt its offer to market trends.