From reaction to strategic action. Since 2020, Corneliani’s work with Hyphen-Group has been a remarkable example of digital transformation. The initial driver – creating a digital showroom to run sales campaigns during Covid-19 – evolved into the foundation of a full-fledged Digital Content Factory: a digital backbone that now consolidates and centralizes content and information across the entire product lifecycle. It is a powerful testimony to long-term vision in a scenario where digitizing brand assets and consolidating a centralized digital product identity are increasingly becoming pillars for future growth and for building AI models capable of truly speaking the brand’s language.
The initial need: a digital showroom
We first engaged with Corneliani at the height of the pandemic. The brand from Mantua needed a digital showroom to ensure continuity of its sales campaigns despite travel restrictions.
What began as an urgent response to lockdown measures has since become a fully embedded, strategic tool for Corneliani. “It is the only place where we have an immediate, concise, and visual view of the collection offering,” notes Stefano Gaudioso Tramonte, General Merchandising Manager and Style Director at Corneliani. The tool is now used across the organization – not only by sales, but also by those who design, coordinate, and make decisions. “It is particularly valuable in complex phases such as blind order setting or defining guidelines for future collections, especially when samples are no longer readily available,” Gaudioso Tramonte adds.
The way products are presented and structured in the virtual showroom also laid the groundwork for B2B product sheets. “Some descriptive fields originally created for the digital showroom – initially meant purely for representation – are now integrated into company systems, ensuring greater consistency and continuity between product representation and management.”
Corneliani’s digital showroom has evolved beyond a technical support tool into a cultural interface connecting vision, operations, and brand storytelling.
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A path of (true) digital transformation
Our field experience alongside leading global luxury and retail brands has taught us that there is no single perfect entry point to digital transformation. What matters most is long-term vision: the ability to see each tool as part of a broader, incremental system.
Corneliani is proof of this. “The digital showroom was a natural but very effective entry point,” explains the GMM. “It immediately allowed us to consolidate in one space many key pieces of information and content – technical, commercial, visual, and descriptive. This made the value of an integrated digital approach instantly tangible.”
“From there, the journey expanded in two directions. Upstream, we worked on digitizing raw materials, structuring and making available in digital form all the information that defines their identity. Downstream, we moved towards e-commerce, with clear benefits in efficiency, communication consistency, and time-to-market.”
Each step enriched and centralized what we call the Digital Product Identity: an organic set of data, media, and metadata that accompanies every item throughout its lifecycle. The combination of DAM and PIM functionalities in the system allowed the brand to plant the first seed of centralization for product data and content – around which the next phases of the project were built.
“If in the early days digital was about representing what already existed physically, today the challenge is to go further,” says Gaudioso Tramonte. “It is about building identity and content even for what is only proposed, not yet produced. The goal is to make existing and potential products indistinguishable – at least from an information perspective – anticipating scenarios, decisions, and narratives. In short, shifting from digital as a reflection of the physical to digital as an autonomous design matrix.”
The brand–digital relationship
Corneliani is also an interesting case study for exploring the relationship between brands and digital. The pandemic accelerated digitalization processes but also heightened awareness that digital transformation is not just about the most visible, consumer-facing aspects – social media, digital marketing, e-commerce. What’s needed is a systemic integration of physical and digital across the entire product value chain.
“Since 2020, the relationship between brands and digital has changed radically – not just in pace, but also, and perhaps most importantly, in priorities,” confirms Gaudioso Tramonte. “The pandemic forced us to reformulate decision-making and operational processes, making them faster but also more horizontal. In our case, top management across functions – traditionally closer to market sensitivities than to procedural labyrinths – gained a clearer understanding of constraints and interdependencies. At the same time, operational teams became more aware of market logic, stepping outside their own ‘bubble.’ This exchange laid the groundwork to rethink hierarchies, roles, and processes, in a continuous exercise of synthesis that preceded true digitalization.”
Digital was therefore not introduced as a reactive fix but as the conscious outcome of a shared process. “Today, digital is no longer just a tool for acceleration -it is a cultural vector that helps redefine decision-making and operational processes.”
Between challenges and opportunities
Every paradigm shift brings both challenges and opportunities, costs and benefits. When it comes to digital transformation, one challenge often overlooked – but truly central – is guiding people through change. Technology alone can achieve little if it is not accompanied by a genuine transformation of processes and corporate culture towards change.
“Looking back, one of the biggest challenges we faced was not technological, but cultural,” stresses the GMM of Corneliani. “One of the hardest things was helping people understand that even describing the obvious has value. Many saw it as a waste of time, whereas what seems self-evident in one function can be invaluable to a colleague in another department. Building a shared language and an information base required time, listening, and patience. But it was also what unlocked the true potential of digitalization: making data accessible, consistent, and actionable at multiple levels.”
Digital Content Factory: tangible benefits, concrete results
Building a Digital Content Factory brought Corneliani a series of measurable outcomes, including:
- optimization of costs and time related to content production and distribution;
- growth in the quantity, quality, and – above all – consistency of materials produced;
- greater reliability of product data across the entire value chain, from internal teams to external channels.
Once data begins to be structured and centralized, the natural next step is to enrich the system with new and existing indicators to meet evolving needs.
“A key example for us was defining and measuring the complexity of the catalog offer, and analyzing its upstream and downstream impacts: on operations, workflows, and costs,” explains Gaudioso Tramonte. “This type of analysis paved the way for a more objective assessment of needs, a more thoughtful allocation of resources, and ultimately, more precise and sustainable budget planning.”
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