The fashion house Bogner, a globally renowned sport fashion and lifestyle brand, selected WoodWing's multi-channel publishing system Enterprise for the production of its home shopping magazine. Published several times per year with approximately 150 pages, the issues are an attractive combination of editorial content and catalog, introducing the summer and winter collections. Additional smaller publications feature the content of the main issues. Because of the distributed production with the participation of a number of external partners, the workflow is extremely demanding.

Founded 81 years ago, the fashion house Bogner, headquartered in Munich, Germany, has been publishing an attractive German-language home shopping magazine since 2004. Within a year, its unique blend of high-quality editorial and informative catalog was honored by the German Mail Order Convention as "Best Catalogue Release of the Year.” In addition to the spring, summer and winter issues, Bogner today also publishes an issue for the sister brand "Bogner Fire+Ice,” named after the famous sports movie of CEO Willy Bogner.

In addition to the internal editorial and design teams at Bogner, a number of external partners such as the creative agency and the prepress service based in Italy are involved in the production process. In order to streamline and to optimize the complex workflow, Bogner selected WoodWing´s multi-channel publishing system Enterprise. A strong increase in both efficiency and transparency of the production process were key objectives of the implementation.

Transparent production process, centralized assets

"With the introduction of WoodWing Enterprise, we were able to integrate editorial and design processes, speeding up production significantly," said Alke von Kruszynski, PR Manager and Editor-in-Chief of the Bogner magazine. "In addition, we are now always aware of the production status and have full access to all files anytime." According to Alke von Kruszynski, the decision to select WoodWing paves the way to possibly create a tablet version of the magazine from within the same workflow in the future.

Based on the content of the main issues, Bogner publishes separate versions for Austria and Switzerland plus a number of other issues such as a special catalog of bestsellers. This repurposing is efficiently supported by WoodWing Enterprise and its editorial management application Content Station.

"The decision of Bogner to implement Enterprise is a trend toward optimizing marketing-oriented publishing processes to publish content via multiple channels," said Jeroen Sonnemans, Managing Director of WoodWing Europe. "We and our partners see a significant increase of such requests from both marketing and IT departments of companies as well as agencies aiming to expand their range of services."

Implementation without pilot

The implementation of WoodWing Enterprise at Bogner is being managed by the Munich-based united systems AG, one of WoodWing´s Authorized Partners, with extensive experience in system implementations in publishing, agency and corporate environments. "Both the editorial and design teams at Bogner, the agency and the prepress team were highly motivated as they worked in concert during the implementation of Enterprise," said Thomas Goldmann, Director of the Publishing Division at united systems. "That enabled Bogner to introduce the system during the production of a 'real' issue without a prior pilot production. There were only five weeks between the initial training and the first sign-off for print."