Since 1981, Freedom has been one of Australasia's most recognizable furniture and homewares brands, with more than 60 stores across Australia and New Zealand and a world-class online store. From sofas and dining suites to lighting and home décor, Freedom helps customers create their own story at home.
Behind that experience sits a genuinely complex catalog. Freedom lists more than 70,000 products online, of which only 12,000 to 15,000 are Freedom's own products — the rest is a large drop-ship assortment. To handle that scale and complexity, the business runs on SAP rather than a lighter ecommerce platform, and it syndicates product data to a wide mix of channels including Google, Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, and a range of affiliate partners.
Getting that data to every destination — each with its own schema and rules — is exactly the kind of work that can quietly consume a development team. Freedom has partnered with Feedonomics for more than six years to take it off their plate.
“I used to be the digital product manager, and now the role is Omnichannel Transformation Manager,” said Federico Jalil, who has been with Freedom for more than two and a half years. “My projects used to be purely digital, and now I take on projects across the business: logistics, stores, whatever. It's a wider scope, so there's lots happening.”
In previous roles I had to manage product feeds one by one. Everyone has a different schema, and that leads to development effort every time. With Feedonomics it's a breeze. It goes from writing the requirement, getting it done, testing it, submitting it, and monitoring it, to where I just write an email to support and off it goes. All I need to do is validate and sign off. That's why I love Feedonomics — it makes my life a lot easier. ”
For a catalog Freedom's size, standing up and maintaining a separate feed for every channel would be a full-time job in itself. Without a feed management partner, Federico explained, each new destination means development hours — customizing the feed to match the recipient's requirements, testing it, and paying for that build at the end of the month.
Feedonomics collapses that work into a short conversation. When Freedom's digital marketing team flags a product they don't want representing the brand on social — a common need across a 70,000-product catalog with a heavy drop-ship mix — Federico simply defines the logic against the fields already in the feed, emails it to support, and signs off when it's done.
“It's literally an additional team member on our end,” Federico said. “Something that would have been a major task for my development team turns into three emails.”
That agility changes what's even worth doing. Smaller opportunities, like standing up a feed for an affiliate partner focused on a single category, used to be hard to justify against the cost and lead time of a development ticket.
It's no longer a question of whether it's worth the effort to accommodate a new feed, because it's literally a short conversation with Feedonomics support. We wouldn't have been agile enough otherwise — by the time we were ready, the opportunity would have sailed. ”
A safety net for the channels that matter most.
When a feed breaks or products get disapproved, the risk isn't abstract; it shows up in sales. For Freedom, the most critical channel is Google Merchant Center, which powers the Shopping and PMax placements that sit at the very top of search results.
“Google is the highest revenue driver channel for us,” Federico said. “If we don't have Feedonomics powering the back of that engine, things start scrambling very quickly.”
The value there is as much about peace of mind as performance. Rather than relying on Freedom to build and maintain its own alerting, Feedonomics monitors the feeds and flags problems within 24 hours of the next update — often before Freedom's team would otherwise notice.
It's a massive safety net for us to have — almost like an insurance policy. You never know when you're going to need it, but it's better to have it in place. Fortunately I've got a wide range of things to worry about, and this isn't one of them. ”
Bridging online and in store — and beyond.
As an omnichannel retailer, Freedom doesn't want its online store to win at the expense of its physical stores. That balance matters especially for big-ticket, considered purchases: few customers buy a sofa without sitting on it first.
“We're an omnichannel business,” Federico said. “We want to give customers the choice of how, where, and when they shop with us. Local inventory ads let us say, 'yes, we sell this — and you can go to this store to sit on it and make your decision there.'”
Standard local inventory logic assumes a product is in stock and ready to buy in store, which isn't true for Freedom's largely made-to-order range — stocking every fabric, size, and configuration combination is effectively impossible. To close that gap, the team worked with Feedonomics to build an “on display in store” feed that tells shoppers where they can go to see and touch a product, even when it isn't sitting on the floor ready to take home.
The platform has also stretched well beyond advertising. Freedom uses Feedonomics to move product reviews between systems, ingesting an XML file from Bazaarvoice, converting it to CSV, and pushing it into SAP Emarsys — a job that would otherwise require a custom middleware pipeline.
We're bending the rules of what the technology can do. Otherwise I'd have to spend hours with my development team building a middleware pipeline to convert and push all that data. The platform can do a lot more than just send a feed to an ad channel. ”
A continuing focus on feed quality.
Freedom has already completed a round of feed optimization with Feedonomics, tightening up product titles, category structure, and channel attributes. With control over titles for its own 12,000 – 15,000 products and an approval process for drop-ship listings, the team has focused on making sure the core of what a product actually is (a chair, a desk) leads the title, rather than a long or “fancy” seller name that buries it.
Federico is candid that the work isn't finished, and points to it as a strength of the relationship rather than a gap: Feedonomics is the one chasing him to keep optimizing, not the other way around. It's a natural focus heading into Black Friday.
“That's what I love about it,” Federico said. “It's in my road map, and I know it's just about me getting the ball rolling with an email — the team is there to get it done.”
Looking ahead: build for what's next.
Ask Federico what he's proudest of and the answer isn't a single campaign. It's efficiency.
I think it's efficiency, to be honest. Something that could be very complicated and time-consuming became very efficient, and it's not something I have to worry about. They're ready to go when I need them. ”
He frames the return in terms of headcount he hasn't had to add: “I'd probably have to hire a full-time developer to manage this. The platform pays for itself just in how much easier it makes managing this side of the business.”
For any retailer weighing how to manage feeds across many channels, his advice is to get the foundation right from the start.
“Build your input feeds properly,” Federico said. “Once you get good data flowing into the database, Feedonomics can take care of the rest. The magic is trying to foresee what you'll need in the future — including fields you don't advertise but need to drive logic, like sending Google your highest-margin products without ever showing Google the margin. You'll save development down the line.”
