NOW Optimizes Product Content with Syndigo
The simple, powerful product experience ingredients NOW uses to save hundreds of hours every year
When you make and sell products for health-conscious consumers, every detail matters. That’s why NOW, a leading provider of natural foods, supplements, and vitamins, makes delivering a comprehensive, accurate, and consistent product experience one of its highest priorities. NOW offers one of the most extensive selections in the natural products industry, with more than 1,400 items across dietary supplements, sports nutrition, clean health and beauty, essential oils, organic and non-GMO foods, pet health, and more.
Its customers turn to NOW for transparent, reliable products they can trust and expect high-quality details, descriptions, and product data. Previously, the company relied on a data management and delivery solution that could not fully support its ambitious growth strategy or evolving approach to bringing product information to market. By adopting a modern Product Experience Management (PXM) strategy, NOW unlocked the full value of its product data and digital assets, delivering measurable results across its business:
- Transferred six years of accumulated product content to a new user-friendly system
- Moved product data out of scattered spreadsheets and into a unified, easily accessible Product Information Management platform
- Established direct connections to its most important retail recipients and quickly began sending them performance-optimized product content
- Saved hundreds of hours per year on manual data management, uploading, and delivery tasks
- Simplified PXM strategy by consolidating GDSN, rich media, syndication, analytics, and PIM in one place
Adapting to a New E-Commerce Reality, One Retailer At a Time
NOW operates in highly competitive and saturated categories across a wide range of retailers and ecommerce channels. To help its products stand out on crowded digital and physical shelves, the brand must fully leverage its unique product attributes and clearly communicate the value they offer to shoppers.
Online retail stores and marketplaces have customized their sites to differentiate themselves from competitors and create a distinct, familiar customer experience that aligns with their brand. As ecommerce evolved and became more fragmented, NOW recognized the need to adapt its product experience strategy to a new reality where messaging and content must be tailored not just for commerce in general, but for the unique requirements of each retail endpoint.
“When I began the role, our main goal was to maintain content and just make sure that our content was distributed across all retailers,” said Larson. “Now we’re moving into how do we optimize that content for the e-commerce space and even more specifically, per retailer, how do we improve that content?”
Thanks to Syndigo’s world’s-largest network of over 3,500 product data recipients, NOW can easily deliver product content for its entire catalog to all of its most important retailers from a single interface. Data arrives to each retailer dynamically transformed for that environment’s specific data requirements and preferences, optimized for performance and ready for quick publishing.
“We’re now in a much better position to be connected with retailers than we were before,” Larson shared. “It allows us to ensure that the content we’re sending out is reaching those retailers and it’s in the exact format they want. You have all your retailers and these clear, concise attributes and you’re already working with them in the background. Say someone like Amazon or Walmart; Syndigo is working with them in the background to make sure you know exactly what they want, and you’re providing that to us as well—’this is what Amazon needs or this is what Walmart needs.’”
Supplementing with Syndigo: A Healthy Balance of Efficiency and Power
Like many of its products, NOW’s marketing team is potent and effective but light on the extras. Bandwidth and resources are tight. That makes it especially important to minimize manual tasks and ensure the team is getting the most impact for its efforts.
As a small team, we’re always looking for a way to gain an edge, and we really work hard to manage how we use our work hours.
NOW competes with many large brands with big budgets and teams, so it needs every edge it can get. Transitioning to Syndigo has unlocked tremendous time savings and amplified the contributions of the marketing team, empowering NOW to do more with less. Larson compared the experience of shifting to Syndigo with upgrading from a complex, manual and code-intensive operating system to one that just “works.”
“The best way I can explain it is our previous provider was more like a Linux system where you have all these tools, but you have to create the code, you have to manipulate the software to do exactly what you wanted to do…and you’re not exactly sure if what you’ve done is correct, or if the retailer is going to receive the content in the way you meant it to be received,” he explained. “When we’re looking at Linux on the other side, Syndigo is more like a Mac operating system. You have all your retailers and these clear, concise attributes and you’re already working with them in the background.”
Completing the product experience loop
The same momentum that helped NOW modernize its product content delivery has continued to shape the brand’s broader product experience strategy. After seeing the value of Syndigo’s content and analytics capabilities, NOW identified the next opportunity in its journey: bringing the product information that still lived in spreadsheets into a more centralized, scalable system.
NOW was already looking beyond one-time content distribution and building toward a more comprehensive Product Experience Management strategy, where product information could be managed, enriched, delivered, measured, and continuously optimized from a single foundation. Adding Syndigo Product Information Management (PIM) provided the missing piece, transforming a spreadsheet-heavy process into a more connected, scalable, and efficient product data operation.
“Adding Syndigo PIM was a natural next step in our digital commerce journey,” Patrick said. “While we had already seen value from several Syndigo solutions, managing product information through spreadsheets was becoming increasingly complex. With PIM, we’ve been able to centralize and streamline product content management, improve efficiency, and strengthen retailer connectivity. Syndigo continues to be a valuable partner as we scale and optimize our digital commerce operations.”
For NOW, the expansion was less about adding another tool and more about advancing a strategy already in motion. With content delivery, GDSN, rich ecommerce media, analytics, and now PIM working together as part of Syndigo’s Product Experience Cloud, NOW has continued making strides externally in how its products appear to retailers and shoppers, and internally in how its teams manage the data behind those experiences. The result is a more comprehensive foundation for product experience growth: cleaner information, more efficient workflows, stronger retailer connectivity, and a clearer path for ongoing optimization.
Founded by Elwood Richard in 1968, NOW has grown from a small, family operation, to a highly respected manufacturer of natural health products. Today, NOW manufactures and distributes over 1,500 dietary supplements, natural foods, sports nutrition, and personal care products. NOW’s state-of-the-art manufacturing facility has been GMP certified since 2000, and its quality testing labs are among the best in the industry. The company has over 1500 employees and its products are sold in more than 60 countries. The company remains family owned and committed to its original mission: to provide value in products and services that empower people to lead healthier lives.