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Beyond the Brochure: Taking Print-Heavy Businesses into Digital Product Management

In the building supplies world, print has held its ground. Product catalogues, technical brochures, printed datasheets—they’re still useful, especially in-branch or out on-site.

But as your customers start doing more online—pricing jobs, comparing specs, checking availability—those PDFs and printouts start showing their limits.

The challenge? A lot of businesses still treat the print catalogue as the “source of truth,” while their website is just something they copy and paste into when there’s time.

That’s holding you back.

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Print Isn’t the Problem—It’s the Process Behind It

Let’s be clear: print isn’t dead. Catalogues still play a big role in supporting reps, counter staff, and trade buyers.

But the way product data is managed behind print often leads to:

  • Disconnected content between your brochures and your website
  • Teams updating PDFs manually but forgetting to update digital channels
  • Long lead times to launch or correct product content
  • Salespeople quoting from outdated specs or missing compliance info
  • No easy way to scale when new products come in
If print is your primary product data workflow, digital quickly becomes an afterthought—and your customers feel it.

What Goes Wrong When Print Drives the Bus

Here’s how it often plays out:

  • Product content is updated in InDesign or another DTP tool
  • Specs, images, and tables are manually entered by marketing
  • The website is updated separately (maybe)
  • Nobody’s sure what’s current—and what’s out of date
And then, you get product questions your team can’t answer confidently. Or worse: customers using outdated information to place orders.

Flip the Flow: Make Digital the Source of Truth

You don’t need to abandon print. But it should pull from a well-structured digital product data source—not be the master version itself.

That means managing your product attributes, downloads, images, and content in a way that:

  • Feeds your eCommerce site, trade portal, and brochures
  • Keeps specs consistent across every channel
  • Supports fast updates when something changes
  • Helps your team launch and enrich products quicker
You could do this with a centralised spreadsheet, a database, or a PIM system—depending on scale. What matters is that you’re not updating five different versions of the same product in five different formats.

Real Example: Launching a New Product Range

Imagine getting a new adhesives range from a supplier. In a print-first business, that often means:

  • Waiting for artwork
  • Reformatting a product table manually
  • Sending it to design
  • Uploading a PDF to the website weeks later
In a digital-first business, you enrich the product data once, check it against your standards, and it’s available immediately across your site, branch tools, and even for print if needed.

Still leading with print? We can help you flip the flow.

We work with building materials businesses to structure product data in a way that feeds every channel—without duplicating work.

Book a quick session to see how digital-first product content can support print—not replace it.

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