Toys"R"Us slashes product launch time by 90% across thousands of SKUs

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The Customer

Since 1948, Toys"R"Us has been synonymous with childhood wonder, bringing joy to generations of families through their vast selection of toys, games, and educational products. Today, the brand is writing its next chapter, combining their beloved retail experience with a modern, digital-first approach to shopping that meets the expectations of today's parents and gift-givers.

As part of their bold reinvention, Toys"R"Us has embraced digital transformation to enhance the toy discovery experience on their flagship website ToysRUs.com. We sat down with  Gary Haas, VP of E-commerce at WHP Global (the parent company of Toys“R”Us), to explore how this iconic brand has modernized their digital operations through AI technology, all while maintaining the magic that has made them a trusted destination for families for over 75 years.

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The Challenge

While Toys"R"Us's retail expansion was thriving, the team recognized a critical opportunity: optimizing their digital presence to match their physical store experience. With thousands of products across their catalog, they knew parents were searching for specific items like "educational toys for 5-year-olds" or "STEM toys for preschoolers", but their product detail pages (PDPs) weren't fully optimized to capture this intent.

Creating and maintaining high-quality product pages at scale had become a significant hurdle, as manually writing descriptions and managing product taxonomies for their extensive catalog was increasingly unsustainable. It involved:

• Time-consuming manual tagging of products for age ranges and categories
• Inconsistent product descriptions across their catalog
• Poor search visibility due to non-optimized content

Toys"R"Us needed a solution that could streamline their entire product page creation process, ensuring both quality and speed while effectively capturing search traffic and meeting modern shopping expectations.

“Running a modern toy e-commerce business means managing thousands of SKUs across multiple categories. Our manual approach to product content on ToysRUs.com was becoming a major bottleneck. We needed to solve this foundational challenge so we could accelerate our digital growth.”

— Gary Haas, VP of E-Commerce at WHP Global

The Solution

Together with the AirOps team, Toys"R"Us implemented a powerful, multi-step workflow that automated their product content creation process and significantly improved the digital presence of ToysRUs.com. They achieved this with:

• Automating product taxonomy & categorization: 
  
  • AirOps AI workflows enabled Toys “R” Us to automatically categorize products, assign age ranges, and add learning skill tags - making products more discoverable for shoppers.
• Optimizing content for brand consistency:  
  
  • The team was able to generate product descriptions at scale that aligned with their brand guidelines.
• Incorporating SEO into the creation process:
  
  • AirOps generated search-friendly meta titles and descriptions that helped them rank higher organically while maintaining consistent brand voice. 

The result: faster launches, better discoverability through SEO, and engaging product descriptions - all while ensuring a consistent customer experience across their catalog.

"We used to spend hours manually writing descriptions and tagging products. Now with AirOps we can get items online faster, giving us more selling days, and we don't have to worry about inconsistent product data anymore—the system handles everything automatically.”

— Gary Haas, VP of E-Commerce at WHP Global

The Impact

By leveraging AirOps, Toys"R"Us.com achieved:

• 90% faster SKU onboarding: Time saved on product pages redirected to strategic work
• 30% YoY organic traffic growth: Better SEO and product discoverability through optimized descriptions
• 45% improvement in overall keyword ranking:  Higher visibility across search results, driving more qualified traffic to key product pages
• Consistent brand voice: Uniform content and presentation across all PDPs
• Efficient and scalable process: Automated workflows replaced manual tools, handling thousands of products efficiently

With this foundation of automated content creation in place, the team is now focusing on enhancing their product discovery experience through AI-powered category optimization and educational content, ensuring parents can easily find the perfect toys for every age and learning stage.

Get Started with AirOps:

Join Toys"R"Us in transforming your E-Commerce content operations with AirOps. Streamline PDP creation, scale SEO performance and traffic, and deliver a consistent brand voice and experience across all your product listings.

Schedule a strategy session with our AI growth experts to learn how AirOps can help you achieve similar results.