By Katie Deatsch

Growth is good for businesses, but it’s often accompanied by growing pains. That was the case with skin care company Nu Skin Enterprises Inc., which sells its products through 800,000 global independent distributors.

Expanding into several new markets in past few years, Nu Skin now operates in 52 regions and countries across Asia, North and South America and Europe. That means Nu Skin has to maintain content across more than 50 web sites in multiple languages.

What’s more, because Nu Skin mainly relies on the web to attract new distributors and educate consumers about its products, it’s important each site offer compelling, current content about its new products along with pricing localized to each market. The company also must make ensure product information on regional sites meets each country’s regulations regarding the sale of anti-aging products. For example, some countries require more specific ingredients lists, instructions or warnings.

With a dizzying amount of sites and variables, Nu Skin last year decided to replace its homegrown content management system with a more flexible, easy-to-use system. The goal was to make it easy for non-technical employees to update the site to minimize the involvement of the company’s information technology staffers in maintaining site content. Nu Skin also wanted the system to integrate with other back-end systems, such as the tools it uses to translate site content into multiple languages.

After evaluating 13 vendors, it chose the Adobe Marketing Cloud system from Adobe Systems Inc. The backbone of the system, called Adobe CQ, integrates with Nu Skin’s GlobalLink translation system from vendor Translations.com, enabling Nu Skin to push out site updates in many languages quickly. Adobe CQ also integrates with Nu Skin’s SAP accounting and business management software. That means the retailer can automatically push out changes to product availability, pricing, and other details are to each Nu Skin site, which helps ensure distributors and their customers have current product information.

“This takes our I.T. team out of the business of managing routine web site updates, and frees them to focus on more strategic, higher-value I.T. initiatives,” says Kevin Zollinger, director of business integration at Nu Skin.

Using Adobe, Nu Skin was able to redesign each of its web sites in nine months. “New product information can be created once, translated, and then instantly delivered to all appropriate web sites worldwide—localization processes that previously took days or even weeks are now handled in minutes,” says Joshua Scott, web architect at Nu Skin. 

For instance, the Nu Skin marketing team updated 25 web sites in 18 languages for European markets in two months. Previously, completing the same task would have taken at least three times as long, Nu Skin says.