In data management disciplines as Master Data Management (MDM), Product Information Management (PIM and Data Quality Management (DQM) the context has a lot say for data that fundamentally are the same. One example is fashion vs work clothes as it applies to PIM and data quality measures required .

Clothes for private (and white collar) use and work clothes are as products quite similar. You have the same product groups as shoes, trousers, belts, shirts, jackets, hats and so on.

However, the sales channels have different structures and the product information needed in sales, not at least self-service sales as in ecommerce, are as Venus and Mars.

Online fashion sales are driven by nice images – nice clothes on nice models. The information communicated is often fluffy with only sparse hard facts on data like fabrics, composition, certificates, origin. Many sales channel nodes only deal with fashion.

Selling work clothes, including doing it on the emerging online channels, does include images. But they should be strict to presenting the product as is. There is a huge demand for complete and stringent product information as we know it in B2B (online) sales.

Work clothes are often sold in conjunction with very different products as building materials, where the requirements for product information attributes are not the same. Work clothes comes, as fashion, in variants in sizes and colors. This is not so often used, or used quite differently, when selling for example building materials.

One challenging area here is where we have work clothes and building materials in the same data pool or in other means of Product Data Syndication (PDS).