Selling workwear products online to B2B customers can be challenging, as each corporate account typically has its own set of specifications and needs a customized product catalog.

Munro’s Safety Apparel is one workwear distributor that has moved beyond that challenge.

Munro’s Safety Apparel is a supplier of customized industrial clothing and footwear from major brands for corporate customers who order such special treatments as customized embroidery, emblems, reflective trims and flame-resistant fabric.

In business for nearly a century, the family-owned and -operated company launched a safety apparel division in 1976, focusing on the workwear needs of the petrochemical industry’s refineries and chemical plants. It has faced a longtime challenge in maintaining product specifications and custom catalogs for each corporate customer.

Now, Munro’s Safety is developing customized commerce sites for individual client companies, Destiny Martin, ecommerce manager, said during a recent webinar presentation.

Building a unique web  experience for each customer

“Our goal with the ecommerce platform is to build unique website experiences for our customers that are defined by their uniform program,” she said.

Each customer website typically has from four to six buyer profile types, each with its own list of products they’re authorized to purchase. Under a prior ecommerce platform, Munro’s Safety says it spent extensive manual labor to manage about 40 unique customer online stores.

The company has since migrated its ecommerce technology to the Znode API-first, headless commerce platform from Amla Commerce Inc. Munro’s Safety says the new platform enables it to build a catalog for an online store within hours instead of one to two weeks under the prior platform.

The company adds that Znode’s built-in product information management system, or PIM, has made it easier to publish up-to-date and accurate product information to all customer websites.

(This article is part of a longer report on B2B ecommerce strategies, Standing Out in the B2B Crowd, which is available as a free download.)

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. [email protected].

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