Product Data Model and Governance for aLuxury Jewelry House

Context

From October 2023 to May 2024 I worked as Senior Business Analyst PXM on the product data of a luxury jewelry house, inside a wider digital transformation program for a fashion and jewelry division, and through a partner agency. My daily work sat between the business teams in France and the United States, the technical teams and the agency.

In luxury, a product page is a promise. A wrong carat or a missing certificate is not a typo, it is a breach of trust.

The challenge

The e-commerce platforms were moving to a headless architecture, and the product data had to follow, with its own constraints: exclusivity, multilingual content and premium editorial standards. A jewelry piece is not described like a T-shirt. It carries certificates, stones, carats, metals and provenance, and each of those details has to be right in every market where it is sold.

The question was less "which attributes do we need" and more "who is allowed to change them, in which language, and who checks it".

What we did

• Functional specifications for the headless refactoring of the e-commerce platforms.
• Product data models for jewelry: certificates, stones, carats, metals and provenance.
• Governance in Akeneo: roles, rights per locale and per category, automation rules, a translation workflow and the link with digital assets.
• Acceptance testing and training sessions for merchandising teams in the US and regional teams in South Korea.
• The Google Shopping catalog for Korea, set up through a feed management tool.
• A/B tests on product display interfaces, to see which enrichment patterns served customers best.

What it taught me

Luxury data is about precision and trust, and governance there is not a document you write once, it is a daily habit: who can change what, in which language, and who checks it before a customer sees it. The data model gives the structure. The habit keeps it true.

For the governance side of a PIM program, see how to manage a PIM project without losing control.