Edith Rehnberg is a Master Data Specialist at Nordic Nest Group, one of the most successful omnichannel retail companies in the Nordics. The company has grown from a small Swedish start-up into a major player in the European home furnishings e-commerce space.
Edith supports product coordinators, bridges teams across operations, sales and tech, and ensures data quality in a business where speed and accuracy are everything. Her perspective reflects what many in her role experience: responsibility without always having the right tools.
“As a Master Data Specialist, my job is to keep order in chaos. I help ensure tens of thousands of products flow smoothly through our systems so that the right product appears on the right site, at the right time. But it’s not uncommon that my days are filled with administrating queues, manual Excel sheets, endless queries, and fixing errors.”
Challenge: They had outgrown the existing PIM
Nordic Nest is a successful company, to say the least, and they handle an enormous amount of product information. The process has become so complex, with numerous manual steps and dependencies, that the company's traditional PIM setup is struggling to cope.
“During high season, we have to book slots for system updates and coordinate tightly with tech and sales to avoid collisions. It can be quite demanding and truly a test of patience.”
But that is just one out of many challenges regarding managing product data:
- Excel overload and fragile planning tools: Planning is managed through extensive spreadsheets. “We have an Excel file with tabs for each product coordinator, full of manual data. It is easy to make mistakes: broken formulas, deleted rows, incorrect dates.
- Long wait times: Updates on large quantities of data can take hours or even a whole weekend to complete. “If a new market is to go live with the full assortment, it has to be done in batches, often over several days, and the update may fail, resulting in errors that require the entire process to be repeated”.
- Data inconsistencies: With so many system connections, inconsistencies are common. Queries have been built just to find errors, but much of the cleanup is manual. The PIM set-up only shows completeness per product, not per batch, making it hard to get an overview.
- Lack of autonomy: Information is scattered across systems, and coordinators rely heavily on experts for answers. “In my role, I receive a constant stream of questions about errors and statuses. This can lead to bottlenecks in the process.”
The result? Instead of focusing on product enrichment and optimization, Edith and her colleagues spend much of their time troubleshooting, cleaning up errors, or simply waiting for systems to respond.
Solution: Control through product orchestration
To break free from these constraints, Nordic Nest turned to Occtoo, the Product Orchestration Engine. For Edith, this wasn’t just about fixing queues but about creating a whole new and more efficient way of working.
“We want to use something where it’s difficult to make mistakes. Processes should be connected, the system should guide us, and it should be fast and user-friendly. With Occtoo, everyone finds the answers they need in one place, without having to ask around,” she explains.
With Occtoo, Nordic Nest Group is redesigning its workflows:
- Faster imports: No more weekend marathons or batch crashes. Imports will run smoothly without the need for manual slot-booking.
- A single source of truth: All product information, statuses, and updates gathered in one place: Occtoo.
- Better control: Coordinators and Category Leads can plan their work more effectively, with clear visibility into priorities and status.
- Smarter automation: Integrations with translation apps and supplier inputs ensure that products are enriched faster, more consistently, and with complete, accurate information.
Result: Faster workflows, better product data, happier teams
Occtoo has supported Nordic Nest Group for years by unifying and activating their data. While the implementation of Occtoo as the company’s new approach to product information management is still ongoing, Edith is clear about the expected impact:
- Less frustration, more speed: “We won’t waste time waiting for systems to load or fixing errors that shouldn’t exist in the first place.”
- Time to focus on value: “Category Leads will spend more time in supplier dialogues and strategic meetings. Coordinators won’t scratch their heads over broken files and conflicting data. Instead, we’ll optimize products and deliver crisper presentations.”
- Happier teams: “Work will simply be more fun. Instead of firefighting, we’ll be creating more value.”
But beyond the daily wins, Occtoo also helps Nordic Nest Group pursue its biggest strategic goals.
“Time-to-market is one of our strongest goals,” Edith explains. “We want to shorten lead times, launch more products, and keep the highest quality. That’s how we stay competitive. With Occtoo, we can do this, without compromise.”
Edith sees Occtoo as a way to elevate her role and the entire product data function:
- No more waiting in queues.
- No more fragile Excel sheets.
- No more scattered answers.
- Just control, speed, and the confidence that product data is right from the start.