Using story infrastructure to produce high-volume product copy.

Erecting the bridges, tunnels and turnpikes needed to support high-volume copy production.

With dozens of sport and fashion categories, hundreds of product managers and multiple information systems, adidas is the Tokyo subway system of e-commerce. We started working with the brand back in 2005, and today Thread produces every adidas product description worldwide, from Montana to Mozambique. What have we learned along the way? That producing brand-right copy at scale is more engineering than poetry.

Digital native shoppers born with a mobile device in their hand expect every piece of copy to sound like a one-on-one conversation with a peer. Having it tens of thousands of times per year takes a robust system, a copy playbook, category style guides, content management software and multiple standardized processes. This is the machine that turns millions of pieces of raw data into thousands of interesting, human-sounding stories.