Projects

VSM Sewing Inc.

"We needed a cost-effective way to convey brand messages in markets all over the world. We needed consistent materials in every language and in every market. This was a huge challenge for our company and when we partnered with GLI to manage our brand assets worldwide not only did we achieve our goal of consistency, we actually saved money and time."

Husqvarna
VSM Sewing Inc.

The Company

VSM Sewing Inc. is a subsidiary of Sweden's VSM Group – a global organization that holds a leading position in the medium to high end segment of household sewing machines. VSM Sewing Inc. is the exclusive U.S. distributor of such prominent names in the high-end sewing machine market as Husqvarna Viking, Pfaff and White.

The Challenge

With its parent organization's World Headquarters located in Sweden coordinating the operations of 17 different Sales Companies, Independent Distributors in another 40 countries, and more than 4,000 dealers around the globe, the unique information-sharing challenges facing VSM Sewing Inc. of Westlake, OH were both daunting yet vital to the company's worldwide success.

As the largest company subsidiary – accounting for approximately 65% of the company's business worldwide – VSM Sewing Inc. not only needed a modern asset management system which could efficiently manage and share its corporate brand building assets with its force of 1,000 dealers in the U.S., it needed a system with the versatility to share information around the world quickly, efficiently, accurately, and in a variety of different languages.

The Solution

AKSESS' Innovative Global Capabilties

In concert with executives from its international corporate headquarters in Sweden, VSM Sewing Inc. embarked in 1999 on a lengthy search for long-term solutions to help manage brand building assets worldwide. The final decision to choose AKSESS, and its versatile marketing communications portal – specifically Asset Driver and Custom Driver modules – has made a dramatic difference to the company.

AKSESS Asset Driver allows all of a company's digitized images and text – even video and audio clips – to be securely stored, organized and formatted, enabling simple and instantaneous retrieval of exactly what is needed from anywhere in the world. Through AKSESS Asset Driver, the more costly and time-consuming prior practice of burning and shipping CDs with this information around the globe as needed was eliminated. AKSESS Custom Driver empowers approved personnel to retrieve images and text, add personalized messages as needed, and insert them into centrally created templates. These are used to create documents such as ads, bag stuffers and newsletters that maintain the consistency of the corporate brand message and transmit them digitally over the Internet.

By its very nature, a huge, worldwide company such as VSM Sewing Inc. spans a variety of different languages. In addition to English and Swedish, VSM's worldwide network also utilizes German, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, French, Italian and Norwegian – so AKSESS's industry-leading ability to translate both the text that the customer sees on the computer screen, as well as keywords and data associated with images and ads is of key importance to the company.

"Potentially, this can be a great tool that can really move our company forward in Europe, as the sales companies and dealers can take advantage of ideas that we come up with in the U.S. and vice versa," said Malin Melin, Marketing Specialist for VSM Sewing Inc. "The dealer network is very different in Europe compared to the U.S. – more dealers are multi-branded. With AKSESS, we can control the brand and locally adapt the advertising at the same time."