About Tiffany Lighting Direct
Tiffany Lighting Direct is a UK online retailer with more than 13,000 products from over 20 brands, from Tiffany lamps to wall, ceiling and outdoor lighting. Alongside their own brands, which they white-label and import themselves, they sell a wide range of brands from suppliers, so many new ranges start life as a supplier spreadsheet.
Mark Hacklett has been Head of E-commerce for nearly 5 years, running the Shopify store end to end. Ads, SEO, email, purchasing and product uploads all go through him.
Speed decides who makes the sale
When you sell well-known brands, speed decides who makes the sale. The same products reach dozens of other shops at the same time.
The quicker we get to market, the better. You've got hundreds of other companies hot on your heels, all listing the same products.”
But supplier data is written for buyers, not shoppers. Columns get mixed up, titles are an afterthought, and every supplier sends a different format. A sheet of 1,000 products meant cleaning it up and retyping titles by hand, row by row, in Shopify upload sheets and Google Sheets.
Supplier data is written to sell to us, not to the end consumer. A title like 'Studio 6lt Pendant' doesn't mean much to the people buying.”
And the timing is always worst at peak. Suppliers promise new products for Q4, then the sheet turns up weeks later, right as the busiest season starts.
A new supplier sheet used to mean weeks, if not months, of work. Now we're talking days.”
How Cernel helps
Mark set up attributes and AI agents in Cernel for his categories and suppliers once. Now a new sheet goes in, the agents fill the gaps and rewrite the supplier data into titles, descriptions and attributes written for shoppers, and the products go back into Shopify.
Every upload builds on the last. The setup is reused, so the next range from the same supplier goes faster again.
Whether it's 100 products or 10,000, the setup takes the same time. You press a button and it brings back what you want to see.”
- Supplier sheet. Title: Studio 6lt Pendant
- Mark's setup. Set up: Once. Next range: Same setup
- Title
- Description
- Attributes
- Meta title
- Meta description
- Shopify. Product: Live
Before and after Cernel
The result
New supplier ranges go live in days. Products reach the market while they're new, which is where the sales are.
The time saved went straight back into the existing catalogue: in-room lifestyle images instead of plain white backgrounds, fresh product copy and meta data, and richer Google Shopping titles and descriptions. Next up is structured category data that helps the range get found in Google and in AI search like ChatGPT.
It's like having an extra employee in the room who takes the heavy lifting off me. We couldn't justify another hire, and for less than one salary we get the help we needed.”
Suppliers always drop new products right before the busiest time of year. I used to have to drop everything to get them ready for peak. Now I'm not worried when a sheet arrives, because I know I can process it quickly.”
