The Return to Documentation Discipline
March 12, 2026 · 11 min read
Your products are invisible. We make them findable.
Plait & Pattern helps industrial distributors and manufacturers recover lost revenue by finding where product discovery is broken, then designing and building the fix with your team.
30 minutes. No pitch. Just clarity on whether we can help.
The growth strategy is working. The infrastructure isn't.
You've invested in digital. A better website. A search platform. Maybe a PIM. Customers still can't find what they need—and you can't figure out why.
Most customer service calls are product questions.
Buyers can't find products that exist in your catalog—so they call. Or they leave. Your best reps are doing support work your website should handle.
30-60% of your catalog may generate zero views.
Products you've paid to source, warehouse, and merchandise—invisible to search. Inventory you own but can't sell.
Every acquisition compounds the data debt.
New catalogs. New naming conventions. New systems to reconcile. The integration backlog grows faster than your team can clear it—and PE firms evaluating platforms notice which ones have their data in order.
AI initiatives fail—or worse, hallucinate.
75% of B2B organizations are piloting AI search. 95% of AI projects fail to deliver ROI. The common denominator: data that can't support the algorithms.
These aren't separate problems. They're symptoms of one: your product data wasn't designed for the scale you're operating at now. Gartner estimates poor data quality costs organizations $12.9 million annually. For a distributor on 3-5% margins, that's not inefficiency—it's existential.
Plait & Pattern fixes the system, not just the symptoms.
The window is closing
The next generation of B2B commerce won't be browsed—it will be queried. AI procurement agents are already executing purchasing logic: 'Find all brass valves with pressure rating above 600 PSI, lead-free certification, and availability within 48 hours.'
If your product is missing the pressure rating attribute, it isn't ranked lower. It's mathematically excluded. It doesn't exist.
Meanwhile, Amazon Business has captured over $33 billion with competitive pricing, fast fulfillment, and deep integration into procurement workflows. You won't beat them on convenience. You beat them by making your technical expertise and product depth findable—something a horizontal marketplace can't replicate.
A generation of leaders who expect self-service is taking over. The organizations that fix their data architecture now will own customer relationships for the next decade. The ones that don't will become invisible to the systems—and the people—that increasingly mediate B2B purchasing.
How we work
One engagement, three phases. Start with a diagnostic to find where discovery is costing you; design the fix with your team; and stay on to keep it fixed.
Diagnose
Find where it's costing you
Focused $7.5–10K · Full $30–50K
An independent read on where product discovery is costing you revenue, why it's happening, and what to fix first.
Start here if: You can't confidently answer "can our buyers find what we sell?"
Design
Build the fix with your team
Scoped to your roadmap
Once the diagnostic shows what to fix and in what order, we design the future state with your team and partners.
Where it leads: The data, workflows, and systems behind the fix—built collaboratively, not handed over.
Sustain
Keep it fixed
Monthly retainer
As you execute, we stay on in an oversight role—tracking discovery quality against revenue and keeping governance disciplined.
Best when: You're executing and want senior oversight without a full-time hire.
Built on 20 years of doing this work
I spent seven years at Zoro watching a $500M business grow past $1 billion—and watching our product catalog grow from 1.5 million SKUs to 14 million. That growth exposed what most distributors don't talk about openly: the systems that work at 1.5 million SKUs collapse completely at scale.
Before Zoro, I learned information architecture for technical products at McMaster-Carr, one of the industry's most respected organizations for catalog design.
I've seen what breaks, in what order, at what scale. That pattern recognition is what I bring to every engagement.
More about my background
Latest from the blog
The Product Triad Is Becoming the Product Team
March 10, 2026 · 12 min read
How to Prepare Your Product Data for the Age of Agentic Commerce
March 6, 2026 · 10 min read
Wondering if your product data is costing you revenue?
Let's find out. A 30-minute conversation will give you clarity on whether Plait & Pattern can help—and if not, I'll point you toward someone who can.