Three Platforms. One Vision. Inside Spin Master’s Enterprise PXM Transformation.

Salsify Transformer Awards 2026 | Category 2: Continuous Improvement of PXM and Salsify Processes

When Spin Master acquired Melissa & Doug, the organization didn’t just gain a beloved brand. It inherited a puzzle.

The result was three separate PIM environments and three independent Salsify instances. Each with its own data model, its own taxonomy, its own permission structures, and its own set of workflows. A single global team was responsible for managing all of it, across multiple time zones and business units, with no shared source of truth.

The operational weight was significant. Product data governance was disconnected. Attribute definitions conflicted across brands. User permissions had grown overlapping and outdated. Publishing to retailers still required manual effort at every step. And perhaps most frustrating: the legacy Spin Master Salsify instance was on an older version that prevented the team from adopting newly released platform features. Every Salsify innovation arrived, only to fall out of reach immediately.

To make things more complicated, some product content had gradually migrated out of the PIM entirely, living in retail environments like Amazon rather than being governed in Salsify. The golden record had drifted. Something had to change.

From Migration to Modernization

Spin Master and Sitation could have approached this as a straightforward system migration: move the data, consolidate the instances, and call it done. Instead, they made a more ambitious choice to treat this as a continuous improvement transformation, one that would not only unify the systems but fundamentally modernize how Spin Master operates its global PXM ecosystem.

The work unfolded across five strategic tracks.

First came the data model. Three unique taxonomies and attribute schemas were consolidated into a single normalized global structure. Redundant attributes were eliminated, conflicting field logic was resolved, and governance rules were designed from the start to prevent future data sprawl, because the goal wasn’t just fixing today’s problems; it was preventing tomorrow’s.

Alongside that normalization, the team built a scalable localization framework directly into the new structure. Rather than retrofitting regional content needs post-migration, Sitation architected a system that supports market-level flexibility while preserving centralized governance, a critical capability for a multinational brand operating across dozens of markets.

All three instances were then migrated into a single advanced Salsify environment, which also meant Spin Master could immediately begin adopting platform features, including AI-driven capabilities, that they’d previously been locked out of.

Restoring the Golden Record

One of the more significant interventions in this project was the Amazon backfill initiative. Because some product content had evolved directly within retail environments over time, Salsify was no longer the authoritative source for those records.

Sitation led a structured effort to scrape live Amazon listings, reconstruct complete product records inside Salsify, and re-establish the platform as the true golden record. This restored governance control and enabled API-based publishing to replace the manual retailer update processes that had accumulated over the years.

AI-Powered Content at Scale

With the foundation in place, Spin Master integrated Plezio Draft, Sitation’s AI enrichment tool, directly into their content enrichment workflows. New SKUs, newly acquired brands, complex approval chains across global stakeholders: Draft streamlined all of it, closing the loop between content creation, review, and distribution entirely within the PXM ecosystem.

The Result

Three PIM instances became one. Product record completeness improved across the catalog following the Amazon backfill. Content creation and approval cycle times shortened. Manual publishing gave way to automated, API-based syndication. And Spin Master emerged from one of the most operationally complex moments an organization can face, a live brand acquisition, with a more resilient, more scalable, and more future-ready digital shelf operation than they had before.

What makes this transformation uniquely noteworthy is not just the scale of the consolidation, but the deliberateness of the approach. Few multinational organizations undertake full data model normalization, system consolidation, AI integration, and retail automation simultaneously during a live brand acquisition. Spin Master did, and they emerged better positioned for everything that comes next.

We’re proud to have been their partner through every step of it.

Stay tuned for the next post in our five-part series as we continue spotlighting the organizations redefining what’s possible on the digital shelf.

If your team is navigating similar challenges we’d love to talk. Reach out to start the conversation.