For 15 years, the home furnishing industry has been trying to get supply chain optimization off the ground. Supermarkets, fashion, DIY: it works everywhere. But in the furniture industry, every attempt hits the same wall. The complexity of product data makes it impossible to agree on a standard. Error-free quotes, digital orders, up-to-date delivery times: it sounds simple, but without reliable product data as the foundation, nothing works.
In the supermarket, every product has a unique barcode. A bottle of cola is a bottle of cola: one item, one code, done. In the fashion industry it works the same way. Every size and color has its own EAN code. That shared language makes digital collaboration possible: retailers and suppliers automatically exchange order and inventory data.
In the home furnishing industry, that does not work. A dining chair can be available in 100 colors, 5 types of legs, 3 heights, and 5 types of armrests. That is 7,500 variations of a single model. At brands like Leolux, the variants run to over a million. It is simply impossible to give every combination its own barcode.
That is why the home furnishing industry talks about configurable products. They only get their exact specification at the moment the customer makes a choice. And that is what makes standardization so difficult.
For these configurable products, no standard for data exchange exists. Every supplier structures their product data differently. Every manufacturer has their own logic for configurations, their own codes for colors and materials, their own calculation rules for prices. Without a shared language, digital collaboration between store and supplier is manual work.
LogicTrade has been working on this since its founding. We have participated in multiple industry initiatives. Every time it fell apart on the same question: how do you create a standard for products that are by definition not standard?
After 15 years of building and testing, we have done it. With LogicTrade Live Items, supplier product data flows to the store in real time. No more export or import files. No Excel lists. The store works directly on the supplier's own data.
In practical terms, that means:
Direct catalog access: The store sees the supplier's catalog directly in LogicTrade, including configurable products with all options and dependencies.
Live inventory indicators: Availability is visible at the moment you create a quote.
Error-free quotes: The quote is based on exact, up-to-date data from the supplier itself.
Digital ordering via UBL: Once approved, the order goes fully digital to the supplier. No separate integration per supplier, no custom work per product group.
Supply chain optimization is no longer a distant dream. With Live Items, you work directly with your supplier based on up-to-date data. No unreliable files, no manual data entry. Error-free quotes, digital orders, and live delivery times — available today for more than 800 stores in the home furnishing industry.
The team behind this breakthrough, with industry experts like Hendrik Bloemert, Gerjan Konterman, Sven Andriessen, Mark Vedder, and Matthijs Zegers, understands the problem from the inside. That is precisely why the solution fits the day-to-day reality of furniture stores and suppliers.