Industry: Building Products | Founded: 1962 | Headquarters: Maumee, Ohio
Challenge: A 5,000-page door catalog with more than 5,700 style options and region-specific versions, plus a Fypon millwork catalog, a price guide and a style manual, all rebuilt by hand from Salsify exports, spreadsheets and a separate image library.
Solution: Pagination catalog automation, generating catalogs, price guides and the style manual directly from Therma-Tru’s Salsify-governed product data and DAM assets.
A Leading Door Manufacturer With a Catalog Challenge
Therma-Tru Corp. is a leading US innovator specializing in fiberglass and steel exterior door systems. Founded in 1962, the company has built a solid reputation for exceptional, diverse products that go well beyond typical entry and patio doors, offering a wide range of decorative elements and complete door solutions. Its catalog spans classic to contemporary styles and meets specific regional requirements across the country: Therma-Tru products are found in homes in all 50 states, with a significant presence in key markets such as California, Texas, and Florida.
What sets Therma-Tru apart is a commitment to pushing the boundaries of door technology and design, including a pioneering use of materials such as fiberglass for durability, energy efficiency, and aesthetic appeal. Its Fypon brand extends the portfolio with polyurethane and PVC millwork products.
To keep all of that product information accurate and consistent, Therma-Tru relies on Salsify, its Product Experience Management (PXM) platform, as its product source of truth, and on Pagination to turn that governed data into print-ready catalogs, price guides, and manuals, automatically.
When Catalog Complexity Became a Publishing Challenge
As Therma-Tru expanded its product lines and targeted a wider range of market segments, presenting its extensive and intricate product information became a major challenge. Its primary catalog exceeded 5,000 pages with multiple variations, and building it meant drawing on structured product data from Salsify, alongside supporting spreadsheets and image libraries.
The challenge was not only the size of the catalog. Each publication also had to be tailored to specific customer segments and regional needs, while keeping product information, images, ordering, and layout consistent across every version.
With more than 5,700 door style options to manage, the manual approach could no longer keep pace. The initial request revealed four interlocking problems:
- Data silos: the catalog production process was disconnected from the systems of record, so even though the product data was well governed in Salsify, moving it into a finished catalog invited errors and broke any streamlined workflow.
- Manual processes: catalog creation was time-consuming, labor-intensive, and prone to inconsistencies, made worse by the volume of product variations and regional customizations.
- Limited customization: adapting catalogs to specific regional needs was complex and resource-intensive.
- Scalability: the manual production process was becoming unsustainable as the business kept growing.
How Salsify and Pagination Transformed The Workflow
Pagination carefully analyzed Therma-Tru’s Salsify data model and existing layout to deliver a catalog automation solution built for both speed and cost-efficiency. Because the product content in Salsify was already complete, well-structured, and governed, the documents generated from it were accurate by default, exactly the advantage a best-in-class PXM brings to automated publishing. Rather than replace the creative process, Pagination created a solid, data-accurate foundation that Therma-Tru’s in-house graphics team could refine, automating the data-heavy work so designers could focus on the creative elements.
The Primary Door Catalog
To manage Therma-Tru’s extensive product data, Pagination built a high-capacity solution supporting up to 20,000 SKUs and 5,000 images. Product content flowed from Salsify, while images were retrieved from the DAM and placed automatically.
Pagination also introduced dynamic 4×4 grid layouts to support different product categories and presentation needs. This made product placement more flexible, improved the visual hierarchy and helped customers compare options more easily.
To improve navigation, the solution included color-coded categories with unlimited color changes across sections.
Beyond Doors: Automating Fypon’s Catalog
After automating the primary door catalog, Therma-Tru extended the solution to Fypon, its polyurethane and PVC millwork line, which had its own distinct structure. Working closely with the Fypon team, Pagination delivered a tailored solution featuring four distinct product layouts to showcase the diverse millwork range, automatic category color-coding for navigation and consistency, and 24/7 availability so the team had complete control to create and publish catalogs whenever needed, always from the same Salsify-governed content.
From Catalogs to Price Lists
The following year, building on the catalog’s success, Therma-Tru returned to automate its price list. Using Pagination’s price list software, the project introduced automated chapter separators for clearer divisions between product sections, and multi-source data integration across three files, one exported from Therma-Tru’s Salsify data, plus two created by Pagination to manage footnotes and product hierarchy and ordering. This ensured categories, subcategories, products, and even individual SKUs appeared in the correct order, for example by dimensions or by finish/material, exactly as Therma-Tru specified, with Salsify keeping the underlying product information consistent across every edition.
Mastering The Style Manual
The partnership extended to Therma-Tru’s comprehensive Style Manual, the most demanding project by page count, with documents also exceeding 5,000 pages. It required two complex product layouts, a product layout and a matrix table for easy comparison of features and options, and used two data files simultaneously to populate comprehensive product information sourced from Salsify. The InDesign Book Feature merged static pages (cover, introductory pages, endnotes, and back cover) with the dynamically generated product content into a single, cohesive, professional document.
Measuring Success: The Impact on Therma-Tru
The implementation of the Salsify-plus-Pagination workflow delivered significant benefits across the business:
- Increased efficiency — Therma-Tru significantly reduced the time and resources required to produce and update its catalogs, price lists, and style manual, reporting a considerable decrease in production time and freeing the team for more strategic work.
- Improved accuracy — with Salsify as the governed source of truth and Pagination automating the layout, the process minimized errors and ensured data consistency across all documents, resulting in more reliable, professional output and a stronger brand image.
- Enhanced customer experience — customized catalogs and price lists gave customers targeted, relevant product information, improving engagement and satisfaction.
- Improved collaboration — a streamlined, automated pipeline fostered better collaboration among Therma-Tru’s product, sales, and marketing teams.
Key Takeaways: The Benefits of Catalog Automation for B2B
Therma-Tru’s success highlights the transformative potential of pairing a best-in-class PXM with automated publishing. By managing its product content in Salsify and connecting it to Pagination, Therma-Tru optimized its processes, improved accuracy, and enhanced customer satisfaction, turning a 5,000-page manual bottleneck into a repeatable, automated workflow.
With Salsify as its product source of truth and Pagination as the InDesign engine, the same governed product content that powers Therma-Tru’s digital presence now drives its print catalogs, price guides, and style manual, no rebuilding by hand. It’s a clear example of how the two platforms fit together: Salsify governs the product experience, Pagination extends it to print.
Ready to streamline your catalog production and unlock new levels of efficiency? Contact us today for a free consultation, or explore how Salsify connects to InDesign with Pagination.
