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SUCCESS STORY
Liquid I.V. is a hydration movement. Whether it is a post-workout recovery, a long-haul flight, or a festival weekend, Liquid I.V.’s signature drink mixes and expanding catalog of hydration assistants play in every situation. Built on the belief that proper hydration unlocks human potential, Liquid I.V. has rapidly grown into one of the most culturally connected lifestyle brands in the wellness and athletics space.
But behind every great brand is an operational engine that has to keep up. For Liquid I.V.’s Sales Operations team, that engine was starting to show some serious cracks. Rapid growth, expansion into new markets, and fast innovation in new products was straining their sales infrastructure, threatening momentum and exposing the business to costly, error-prone processes and technology.
As a brand built on helping people be and feel their best from the inside out, Liquid I.V. knew its internal systems needed to match the pace of its growth and continue serving exceptional product experiences to its customers. By modernizing how it manages and activates product data, the team accelerated time to market, prevented costly data errors, brought critical information for a ballooning SKU count together in a single source of truth, and built a flexible foundation for future scale.
Steve Poon, Senior Manager of Sales Operations at Liquid I.V., has been with the company for five years. His role is the connective tissue of the sales team: broker management, trade shows, tech implementation, and everything in between. For a long time, product master data was the part of the job that kept him up at night.
The problems he encountered were not due to any single failure, but the system itself. Product information lived in spreadsheets. Images were stored in Dropbox. New item forms were filled out by hand. And all of it had to be pieced together and manually entered into their GDSN provider. Every handoff was another time-consuming opportunity for something to go wrong. “We had a lot of manual process, a lot of duplicative work going on, and all of those things are ripe for human error,” he said. “There was a clear need for a single source of truth for our product master data.”
The data fragmentation was not just inconvenient; it was a financial liability. Liquid I.V. used the Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN) as one way to share item information with its retailers. In the GDSN world, a single incorrect UPC transmitted to a retailer can trigger fines across every instance of that error in their system. One particularly painful data mistake, multiplied across retailer platforms, resulted in a cost that was just shy of $1 million, according to Steve.
That experience made the need for change clear. This was a systemic issue that couldn’t be fixed with just another spreadsheet process or a better handoff. Liquid I.V. needed a stronger foundation for product data, one that could scale with the business and prevent errors before they reached retailers.
Liquid I.V.’s product experience transformation began with a simple question at exactly the right time. During a call with the Syndigo team about the product content syndication solution they were already using, Steve took the opportunity to ask for a quick look at something that had been on his mind: “Can you show me what the GDSN solution looks like?”
He found something he’d never experienced before with his previous GDSN provider: a clean, intuitive UI, a real-time compliance panel showing exactly which fields needed attention before publishing, and a guided checklist walking each item toward 100% readiness. It was a completely different experience from what he had been using. “I was blown away by how much cleaner the user interface was,” he said. “That was the light bulb moment — Syndigo can really be this one-stop shop for all of our needs.”
Building the internal business case came next. Steve had a vision for consolidating and simplifying the complexity of product experience management, but needed support from key stakeholders across the business. Instead of leading with technical details and acronyms, he shared with an analogy that anyone could understand: clean product data is the plumbing of a house. Nobody talks about it. Nobody is excited by it—until something leaks. Then it is all anyone can think about. The transition was an investment in the future, and an insurance policy. And after experiencing the hefty fines that bad data created, leadership understood exactly what that meant.
Today, Liquid I.V. manages their entire product data operation for 500-600 finished goods SKUs through a fully integrated Syndigo ecosystem. Three solutions, working together in one platform.
The data hub and golden record for product data, Syndigo PIM connects directly to Liquid I.V.’s ERP, pulling in finished goods, components, and display materials. It gives the team a single, authoritative resource for information and assets associated to every product in their catalog. What used to live across scattered spreadsheets now lives in one place.
Liquid I.V. uses the syndication platform to easily send product content to retail partners in the required format and manage their ecommerce product detail pages. What used to be a manual, error-prone multistep process is now automated, centralized, and consistent.
Items are published through Syndigo GDSN to its own GDSN data pool—the largest and most connected in the world. Built-in validation checks, real-time error flagging, and UPC-level accuracy enforce compliance and keep retailers happy, preventing rejections and chargebacks. The compliance checklist Steve saw in that first demo is now part of their daily workflow.
The interconnectedness of these three solutions is what makes the real difference. Data flows from PIM into CES. CES feeds GDSN. The consolidation creates efficiency through simplicity for Liquid I.V.: fewer platforms to master, fewer vendor relationships to maintain, and fewer contracts to juggle.
A platform is only as good as the team behind it. The migration to Syndigo GDSN was one of the most operationally complex data projects Liquid I.V. had taken on: a full GLN (Global Location Number) purge, hundreds of SKUs to migrate, GS1 compliance considerations, and a timeline that ran straight through the holiday season. It kept Steve up at night.
What changed everything was the Syndigo onboarding team. Liquid I.V. was assigned a dedicated onboarding specialist who became their guide through every step of the migration — answering questions about item duplication risks, GLN number transfers, GS1 impacts, and best practices for moving an international SKU library. “Every time we spoke to these people, it was very individualized attention, very focused on Liquid I.V.. We’re now in production, and the team really helped shepherd us all the way to the end.”
The most important result for Liquid I.V. since transitioning GDSN operations and product information management to Syndigo is one you won’t find on a dashboard: zero chargebacks tied to data errors since the switch. For a brand that absorbed a cost just shy of $1 million from a single data mistake, the ROI is significant—even if it doesn’t show up neatly on a chart.
Beyond risk elimination, the operational shift has been substantial. With Syndigo’s three platforms working in concert and Attribute Value Mapping Transformation (AVMT) reducing manual re-keying across the board, Steve and his team spend less time chasing data inconsistencies and more time focused on activities that actually drive revenue. The AVMT capability in particular is a game-changer: by establishing attribute maps that control how data flows from PIM into CES and downstream to retailers, the potential for human error is dramatically reduced at the source.
The foundation is solid. The plumbing works.
Beyond risk elimination, the operational gains have been substantial. With Syndigo’s three platforms working together, Steve and his team spend less time chasing inconsistencies and more time on work that drives revenue. “It really does free up my time to focus on more responsibilities that are directly related to selling,” he said. “It gives me time back in my day.”
One tool in the platform, Attribute Value Mapping Transformation (AVMT), is especially impactful. It reduced manual re-keying by using standardized attribute mapping to “translate” Liquid I.V.’s own product data fields into the correct fields for retailers, reducing errors at the source.
The ease of use has been just as important as the functionality. For anyone who has worked with a legacy GDSN provider, the difference in the Syndigo experience is immediately noticeable — and that simplicity compounds over time, turning what used to be a source of operational anxiety into a reliable, confidence-building daily workflow.
Ease of use has been just as important as new functionality for Steve and team. With a clean interface and built-in guidance that makes it clear what’s needed before publishing, the team can move faster with confidence. That day-to-day simplicity compounds over time—turning product data management into a reliable, low-friction workflow they can trust.
After attending Syndigo Connect—Syndigo’s annual customer summit—Steve returned with a bigger perspective on what Liquid I.V. had already put in place. The team wasn’t just “live” on new tools; they had built a foundation that could support what’s next. A standout session on the future of commerce and AI sharpened how he connects product data to brand growth, and why getting it right now matters.
What resonated most to Steve wasn’t another conversation about fields and checklists—it was how quickly discovery is changing. AI-powered search is already shaping what shoppers see, trust, and ultimately buy.
For a brand like Liquid I.V., whose consumer is younger, digitally native, and discovery-first, this is not a distant concept. The next generation of shoppers is already heavily using AI as part of how they learn about brands, research products, and make purchasing decisions. With Syndigo, Liquid I.V. can be confident that its efforts to streamline, optimize, and syndicate product content will help ensure it is being considered in the AI-supported shopping journeys of tomorrow.
Steve describes Liquid I.V. as being at steps two or three of ten in their Syndigo journey. The infrastructure is live. The team is aligned. And as Syndigo continues to expand its capabilities, Liquid I.V. is positioned to grow right alongside it.
If Liquid I.V.’s story of scattered product data, tedious manual processes, and outdated GDSN technology sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Here’s what Steve would say: