From 'We Can't Onboard This Brand' to Live in 36 Hours: A JEGS Case Study
If you work in or around auto parts, you've heard of JEGS.
For over 60 years, JEGS Performance has been one of the most trusted names in performance automotive parts, serving racers, enthusiasts, and everyday drivers across the country. Behind the scenes, though, their growth depends on something far less glamorous: messy product data.
Like most aftermarket companies, JEGS has a lean team of full time content professionals. Danny is in charge of onboarding new brands and SKUs: a crucial growth lever to expand coverage and unlock revenue.
Over the last few months, Danny has also become the resident Versable SME at JEGS. Last week, I was able to sit down with him to understand what's changed and what impact we've had on his onboarding processes.
The tl;dr?
"There used to be a backlog of new brands we were trying to onboard. Now we're not backlogged by any means… And if we wanted to onboard more, we wouldn't be held up by [the content team]"
The reality of supplier data and a very manual status quo
Danny estimates around 60-70% of new brands provide messy data that requires a meaningful amount of manual intervention:
- Going to the vendor's website to pull out attributes not included in the input file,
- Pulling multiple similar sites to complete fitment and application details,
- Cleaning messy HTML tags out of all descriptions and titles, and
- Making sure all product content quality is up to JEGS standard.
Danny puts it simply:
"It was very tedious, very long, and very frustrating."
For these new brands, onboarding typically took anywhere from a few days to over a week. Not only did this stall new products from becoming listed and delay time to market, but it also limited the number of new brands the company could realistically take on with a lean team of catalog managers.
There's a natural ceiling when onboarding is manual — not because of strategy, but because of bandwidth. Even if buyers identify strong new brands with real demand, the content team still has to process every SKU, fill in every field, format all content, and normalize every fitment file.
An even bigger problem was a whole other segment of new brands whose data quality required so much cleanup effort that it outweighed the potential revenue upside. Some brands provided little more than a product name and part number. Others missed fitment files entirely.
This is the unfortunate status quo of the auto aftermarket. Demand exists. Supply exists. But data quality is a bottleneck that creates a gap.
What changed with Versable?
Versable closed this gap for JEGS. Now, when a new brand comes in with nothing more than a part number and title, Danny can:
- Pull in all missing attributes from the supplier website,
- Normalize messy input product data (including HTML tags and inconsistent formatting),
- Clean up and standardize fitment formatting,
- Scrape similar websites for comprehensive fitment coverage, and
- Auto-generate rich product titles and descriptions.
The technology behind Versable is powered by a set of proprietary AI agents built specifically for technical industries like the aftermarket (more on this in a later blog post!). And despite the complex tech, our UI is designed for catalog teams, not engineers.
Danny simply logs into his Versable account through his web browser and loads in his raw supplier files. After a few minutes to set up his workflow, within a day or two he gets back a market-ready file: formatted to internal standards, compliant with their systems, and ready to start selling.
In the last month, JEGS has processed over 400k rows of data, scraped dozens of sites, and launched all the backlogged brands with Versable.
What changed isn't just speed; it's scale. Instead of spending days manually translating messy data, Danny can now run a repeatable, low-touch workflow that scales as JEGS grows. A 500-SKU brand and a 10k-SKU brand follow the same simple process. There's no additional operational strain, engineering dependencies, or headcount required.
Growth is no longer constrained by cleanup effort; it's driven by strategy.
ACME, Inc.*: from "we can't onboard this" to live in 36 hours
An actual example we talked about is one of the newest brands at JEGS: ACME, Inc.*
When the catalog team first received the raw supplier file, it was missing so much information that onboarding likely wouldn't have happened at all with the old workflow.
Instead of rejecting the brand, Danny ran it through Versable, and the brand was live in a day and a half with over 1,000 new parts. The brand has gone on to sell really well for JEGS.
*ACME Inc. is an anonymized name to protect brand privacy
Closing thoughts
At Versable, we don't think about ROI as just hours saved or costs reduced. The real opportunity for us and the aftermarket lies in the low hanging fruit that's already within reach: brands not onboarded, the long tail of ignored SKUs, and revenue postponed by slow time to market.
We're so excited to continue working closely with Danny and the team to deliver measurable growth for JEGS. Their willingness to test, iterate, and grow alongside Versable has helped us sharpen the product that I think will push forward the entire aftermarket ecosystem.
Closing out with a quote from JEGS' CEO, Gabe Mendoza:
"At JEGS, we constantly expand our catalog with new brands and products to drive growth and customer satisfaction. By partnering with Versable we leverage AI to accelerate our onboarding process from weeks to days, significantly reducing costs while ensuring our customers find what they need online faster."
Special thank yous to Danny, Terry, Bill, and Gabe for being a part of our journey! We're just getting started.
PS: welcome to our fourth blog post! I'm Christina - founder and CEO of Versable. If you're interested in getting started with Versable or want to learn more, feel free to shoot me an email at tina@versable.ai
