December 16, 2019

Rio Grande is one of the jewelry industry’s largest suppliers. They manufacture, source, and distribute tools, equipment, gemstones, findings, casting alloys, and fabrication metals as well as display and packaging products. As if that weren’t enough, they also provide technical support, educational content, and industry events.

Rio Grande first reached out to PUREi in early 2017 with a problem. Their catalogs were massive. One was over 1200 pages. The other, almost 900 pages. Their in-house design team was inundated just keeping up with the laborious manual design & layout tasks these catalogs posed.

One of the first things that PUREi recognized was that their catalogs could be streamlined using database-design merge methodology. PUREi developed a custom web-based portal for data entry to facilitate the large-scale database-design merge task at hand. The first step was for PUREi to enter data into the new portal, merging multiple existing data sources with newly entered data that didn't exist anywhere else.

Database-design merge methodology saves on average one-third to one-half the cost of traditional catalog design with manual design & layout. Any changes and modifications are usually limited to simple database updates. Future catalog designs are even easier as templates are reusable and updatable. 

PUREi finished the 1200 page catalog within 6 months from start to finish, while at the same time refining the process for future projects. Another 900 page catalog project followed and went even smoother and faster than the first, thanks mostly to the data portal work that was done and the repurposing of existing scripting and data merge methods.