What's in HEINI from day one
Instead of stitching together five tools — one layer in which product data, variant logic, the passport, approval, German hosting, x-Bar and memory work together from day one.
When a mid-market company today wants to manage its product data properly — sorted, multi-channel ready, traceably stored — it usually stitches together three to five tools. One for the product data itself. One for distribution to marketplaces and shops. One for the digital product passport, which becomes mandatory in many sectors from 2027. One for the audit trail that the auditor or regulator must later be able to reconstruct. And usually one more for the images.
Each of these tools comes with its own contract, its own monthly fee, its own learning curve. The interfaces between them are rarely clean, because every vendor wants to extend its own piece, not the whole picture.
We built HEINI differently.
What is included from the very first day
The following is part of the plan — no add-on, no module surcharge, no third-party marketplace app:
Product data in one source. Standard products, configurable products with variants and options, composite products with bills of material. All in the same interface, the same model.
A constraint editor in seven views. Anyone who has ever maintained complex variant logic — “if colour is red and size is L, the cut must not be slim” — knows that a single input form does not get you there. In HEINI you see the same rule as overview, list, tree, mindmap, matrix heatmap, flow diagram and pair list. You switch the view to fit the question. The market standard is exactly one view.
The digital product passport. Not as a third-party marketplace app, but as a fixed part of the system. A validator checks the required fields before anything is written. The format follows the W3C standard, the issuer is signed — eIDAS 2.0 compliant. Composite products inherit required fields to their components. Seven years of retention are anchored in the system.
An audit trail that cannot be overwritten. From summer 2026 onwards, HEINI records every constraint change as a stamp into an external evidence chain. Who changed what when is no longer a question of trusting the database, but is verifiable in the chain. If your auditor or accountant wants to reconstruct a change from two years ago, that takes seconds — and no-one can “remove something from the log”.
Hosting in Germany, a dedicated stack per customer. Your compose stack runs at Hetzner in Falkenstein, ISO 27001:2022 and BSI C5 Type 2 certified. No third-country transfer, no shared cloud instance. GDPR is not an afterthought, but anchored in the architecture.
A tier model with mandatory approval. System proposals first land in a preparation area; the actual step only happens after a human signs off. Three responsibility levels live in the data model — who may do what is cleanly separated.
Voice input and the x-Bar. Cmd+K, type or speak — Heini finds, asks back and prepares. In the shop and in the back office.
Memory control with source attribution. Every note Heini keeps carries a visible origin. You see where an answer comes from. You can delete or pause a source. The memory swamp — that diffuse cloud of half-truths many systems build up over time — does not arise in HEINI.
What is added by year-end
By 1 October 2026, four points are scheduled for the next product wave:
- A clean approval layer with automatic rejection and rollback by switch
- A bank-statement layout for history, PDF export of every individual action
- Memory hygiene with conflict detector, source tag, separated scopes
- A breadcrumb trail on every answer, a lean tool view per colleague
Plus scheduled actions with a pause switch and industry-specific default waiting times.
What is planned for 2026 and 2027
Four packages in a planned delivery path through to the first quarter of 2027:
- Summer 2026: live variant resolution in the buyer’s browser via a shop extension. Instead of mirroring data into the shop, HEINI lives in the shop with you. Plus the external evidence chain for every constraint change — in production.
- Autumn 2026: multi-language scoping per attribute. Anyone maintaining several languages gets separate values per language and per channel. Single-language customers stay on one language; larger customers can activate it.
- Late autumn 2026: brand registry and image database with attributes. Brands, designers, collections with their own attributes. Images with tags, resolution, format as maintainable data.
- Spring 2027: programming interface to the modern standard. Variant templates for recurring structures. With this, even the most specialised need is covered.
Three examples from daily work
The dispatcher tells the voice input “order from delivery 4711 into the ERP”. HEINI asks back whether all 23 line items or only the first five — she says “all”. In the background, HEINI writes the order, attaches the document to the digital product passport and stamps the change into the evidence chain. The dispatcher has done in 20 seconds what previously took eight clicks and a switch between three tools.
The auditor asks in May 2027: “When was the constraint rule for lamp configurations changed?” You open the audit view, click on the lamp configuration, and see the entry from 14 March 2026, 11:42, triggered by HEINI, with an anchor in the external chain. The auditor nods.
The marketing colleague wants to push the new spring collection to Shopify and Amazon. She maintains the data once in HEINI. The shop pulls the variant logic live from HEINI — the buyer in the shop sees no broken combinations, because HEINI lives in the shop, not just mirrors data into it.
Why it is built this way
We decided early on not to build yet another PIM that sits on top of existing rules. We wanted a system in which data management, the product passport, the audit trail and voice input do not need three weeks of integration of different vendors, but work together on day one. Not because HEINI does less, but because HEINI hangs together.
What you save
The tool for product data. The tool for distribution to marketplaces. The tool for the product passport. The tool for the audit trail. The tool for the images. Five contracts, five invoices, five learning curves, five interfaces that someone has to maintain.
And the weeks in the year in which someone in your team adjusts the bridges between all of that, instead of selling products.