56. “It Just Worked:” The Howard Elliott Experience with PIM | Derek Foster

Speaker A: Welcome to E Commerce with Coffee, a, uh, podcast powered by Amber Engine where we share e comm secrets for brands over your favorite brew. We start with the caffeine and then leap enthusiastically into behind the scenes E comm insights that led to the success of our guests. I'm Nate Svoboda and I'm about to serve you up the best. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to a very special episode of E Commerce with Coffee. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Derek Foster. He is the director of E Commerce at the Howard Elliot Collection and a longtime Amber Engine partner and client. So Derek, really, really excited to talk to you today about your experience in partnering with us so far.

Speaker B: Really excited to be here and talk to a fellow data nerd.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And let's, you know, I love nerding out. Let's make sure that we do that in this conversation. And I have no doubt that we're going to. But just really diving right into it, you've worked at Howard Elliot for a little over a year. You come from overstock, so you have an awareness of the importance of product data and how it enables brands. So I'm really excited for this conversation. But thinking about Howard Elliot specifically before Amber Engine, how many sellers and channels did you work with before implementing the pimp?

Speaker B: Sure, we had a range of marketplaces scaling from the multi millions down to, you know, startups that are, uh, new and launching, but maybe were old existing business relationships or people we knew through the industry. So the scale of them varies pretty dramatically. Obviously in the marketplaces in which we sell, however, in terms of quantity or count, we're probably in the, call it 25ish range that we uh, are engaging with on sort of a monthly yearly basis.

Speaker A: Okay. And so talk to me a little bit about the ways in which you partner with those channels and how that's changed since working with Amber Engine.

Speaker B: Sure, our relationships could be as simple as, hey, we are going to start stocking your product either in our stores and on our website or on our website alone. Or perhaps, you know, we are going to fill ah, in some gaps in our line, but only with a small portion of your assortment. Things like that used to be really difficult for us to do because we would have to effectively give someone a, uh, standard canned set of data or a standard canned report and then we would individually have to sit and tailor data. So we had a body in a chair or role whose job was simply to delete or add columns that were missing to our standard set of data. So this has Allowed us to really be more flexible, be more nimble, and be faster at being able to fulfill the needs of any of the marketplaces, regardless of their size.

Speaker A: And so I'm curious, and if you don't have a specific number, just a ballpark or a general range is fine. Before working with a pim. And I understand you guys did have some type of solution. Uh, not exactly like a pim, but I think there were some overlapping functionalities. How long did it take you to prepare product data for a launch before Amber Engine?

Speaker B: That could range pretty significantly, let's say. We typically introduce products at every single market. So we always have a swath of products that needs to get loaded, you know, in a short time after we return home. Now, the marketplace ease of use always varies pretty differently, right? I mean, we have some of them out there that are very difficult to use with multiple websites, multiple portals. You know, you're going to check in more than once over the course of, say, a week when you're building out products. And we have some that are just lightning fast. A simple upload and forget it. So that could range pretty, uh, dramatically. So I think what we're really talking about when we're talking about time savings is those where we saw the improvement. Right? And then that would really be, I mean, in terms of being able to get the product data, we used to, it was faster to just send a spreadsheet around at a certain point. Right. So to your point, you said, hey, we had a tool that we were using, but frankly, we were going around it. We were sending things back and forth, filling in columns of data, and then hoping it eventually made it back into our system. So in terms of a time estimate, you know, that's tricky because it gets down to. It wasn't just that one person anymore. It was suddenly our vice president of sales that had to be involved our entire product development. It was the amount of distraction, it was the amount of just kind of chaos the process inserted into it. So it's tough to quantify that. We did measure from a standpoint of our E Commerce team how much of a savings that we were getting. And it was notable. It went from hours down to minutes.

Speaker A: And how many total people would you say are involved? Because sometimes when we have these conversations, the brands that we're speaking to, they don't necessarily think about all of the hands that have to touch the product content. And you even just mentioned, uh, I forget if you said your president or your vice president, but even someone at that level is going to, at Some point want eyes on the content. So can you talk to me a little bit about who all is part of that process or was part of that process?

Speaker B: Sure. Just by implementing the pim, we were able to really streamline it. Right. And that was an effect, uh, of just looking at our process, not necessarily the tool, but also just looking at it and saying, all right, well, if we imp anything out there, it's going to be better than what we're doing today. So let's make sure we have the right tool to do those steps the fastest. So previously, I mean, to your point, we would have our president, our vice president, the director of E Commerce, our product development team, which would be another two individuals, our operations manager, which would be third, our website, uh, individual. So we're talking. We went from five to six, down to two.

Speaker A: Wow. Five to six, down to two. And you said the hours down to minutes. Right. Man, I love it.

Speaker B: In terms of just giving our data away and things that people need to be able to set up and sell our products, giving our customers a better experience. That's not even in reflection upon the things that we use our own data for, our own analysis here or there, or being able to check on a product quickly, things like that.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And one thing that I think of, of everything you just said, the piece that I really want to hone in on is that it's not even necessarily the tool that made all of these time savings a reality. It was the way that the tool enabled you to change your process and streamline your process.

Speaker B: Yeah, I would say the tool gave us the opportunity. Right. And then making sure we had the right tool gave us the speed.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And let's dive into that right now. So talk to me. Well, I guess you already talked a little bit about what product information management looked like before Amber Engine. Um, but at the time, you know, again, you had another solution. We don't need to dive into the nuances of that tool. But were there any thoughts on you or your team that there's got to be a better way to do this, or were you all kind of blissfully unaware?

Speaker B: Well, I'm lucky enough to have only started a year ago. The team started looking into, uh, partnering with Amber Engine, I want to say, two years ago. So they had a long runtime of possibilities and sort of this what can we do Ideology. They just didn't have a director of E Commerce and a chair that could help them implement. And that's really where I came on board. So when I started, it definitely was a Hit the ground running sort of opportunity. Right. But we definitely had looked at all of these different methods and modalities and things to just be able to manipulate our own data prior to that. And I think they had basically exhausted themselves of every idea of every method, of everything they could possibly do. And we just needed a way to kind of clear our brains really and uh, give us some, not just organization, but some organizational clarity, I would call it.

Speaker A: Right. And it's hard to know what you don't know. Right. There's so many tools out there that do so many things, you know, if you don't even recognize that there's a better way to do it, then you're not even going to know to look or what to look for.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's worth mentioning we're a relatively small size company that's doing some good growth numbers. So we have that interesting problem of we can't, we probably wouldn't be suited for the biggest, most expensive tool out there. It would probably dwarf our size. It would probably, you know, encumber our finances and be too hard for our individuals to use. And not really. It would give us feature overload versus, you know, covering our bare necessities in just the way we needed it. Really what brought us to Amber Engine was the customization and the fact that it was nimble enough to be our size at any size.

Speaker A: So I want to come back to that in a minute. But before we do, before we go into Amber Engine, still thinking about pim, sort of agnostically, what was the final catalyst that made your team decide, you know, what we are moving forward with a pim, regardless of what provider we end up selecting, we are going to select one.

Speaker B: Yeah. The day that, uh, we knew we had to was the day that we finally took all of our catalogs from every website, from every marketplace, from every partnership that we have and said, let's make A list of SKUs, a total list of SKUs, and see what is where. And we found just pure chaos. But amid the chaos, what we found is most of it was still missing. So what was there was chaotic, what wasn't there was critical. And it was mission critical to get it loaded very, very quickly. We know product data can always be improved. It can always be more accurate. Things can always be better suited to what your customer is searching for and looking for. And those things have to be retooled in time. And we knew the tool would allow us to do that down the road. But really, year one, day one, what we used it for was implementation of our product catalog, um, universally across the appropriate channels for it. We had no real method to see where something was before because it was, you know, do an analysis per spreadsheet, per marketplace, per day. That's just not something we were capable of doing. Whereas an Amber Engine, we could facilitate the load one time and kind of maintain as we went along.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And I think that's so important because so many companies don't have a way to objectively measure the completeness and accuracy of their data. Right. It's not even just a matter of is everything there? Which in your case, it sounds like some things were missing, but is what's there even accurate? Right.

Speaker B: Yes. We definitely focused on a tool that we could measure our own accuracy, but also just something that we could implement from a customization standpoint. One of the things we were able to do is because it's effectively an infinite scroll of data, you can use it for whatever you need it to. So we were able to say, is it on this site? Is it on this site? Is it on that side? Build out 40 different columns, do an analysis, and then, frankly, just purge those columns because we had what we needed. Whereas back in the day, that would be, you know, some sort of a relational database that required management, coding, programming, things like that.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And I think you already started to give an answer here, so if your answer is the same, absolutely, that's fine. But then when the evaluation got to the selection stage, what was the main reason or value proposal that got you and the team to choose Amber Engine over all the other solutions you'd been evaluating?

Speaker B: Sure. Well, your team is a big part of it. Right. We've had a very close partnership with your team in terms of what are our needs, not just for what we're trying to accomplish today, but tomorrow and next year. Uh, you've been very transparent with your roadmap with us, and you've been very accommodating and allowing us to sort of give feedback and, uh, really become integral into that process in terms of what do your customers want to see and need to see. It was great, because once we started working with your team and saying, all right, let's do a demo, let's do these tests, it became a lot less about what can Amber Engine do, and a lot more about what can Amber Engine do for you. That was the very big difference here was the tailored customization and the level of detail that you were able to get to, and then just simply integrating us into your ecosystem of the oncoming changes and evolution and how do you

Speaker A: feel of the promises that were made, uh, in sort of the initial, the beginnings of the partnership? How do you feel Amber Engine has been delivering on those promises?

Speaker B: Every box has been checked so far. I received an update this morning that one of the other features we're still tracking to accomplish this is something we noted later, not something that amberengine is late on. Uh, is slated to be finished in Q1, so we get regular updates. We were also notified today that there'll be a release coming this evening with some new features that will be outlined. So the communication's been great. It's been amazing for us just to see this stuff rolling in. Uh, in the beginning, I felt like I was known a bit as a, as a troublemaker because I was always pointing out the problems. But your team kept tackling them so rapidly that the problem simply became, you know, working adjustments to your tool. And they came very quickly and they came rapidly and they came. And I think this is really, really important that I don't think a lot of people mention they worked right. The first time. This was never a half baked pie.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: There were instances where it was, we can give you feature one today and feature two tomorrow and give you two fully baked pies. But we never received a half baked pie that we just were upset with.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And we appreciate that. Right. I mean, at the end of the day, uh, it's funny you say that you, you thought of yourself as a troublemaker because at the end of the day, I feel like a lot of solution providers out there, they, they take feedback, but they don't necessarily do much with it. Right. Like it goes into a backlog, it goes into a ticketing system. Um, but one thing that we really want all of our partners to feel from the relationship is that we want to make the solution work for you. Right. We are in it for you as a business partner and the success of your business is the success of our business. So I appreciate you saying that and I'm glad that you feel that way.

Speaker B: One thing Amber Engine has never said to me is it's working as intended. I hate that statement because that statement is only relative to what I think is intended. I understand that somebody can have a design to a spec, but if it doesn't meet your customers need, it doesn't meet your customer's need. I've never had those words said to me by the Amber Engine team, and I have had those words said to me in the past 24 hours by competitors, man.

Speaker A: Well, those people, you know, I Guess it's just a matter. It's a factor of how they run their business. But, you know, you, you mentioned the close relationship with the team. Talk to me a little bit about what the onboarding and implementation process was like. You know, how are you feeling? What was it, you know, this daunting task looming over you? Did you feel relaxed and comfortable and, you know, what were the steps that you and your team had to take in conjunction with what Amber Engine did?

Speaker B: Sure. Let me first say it was surprisingly easy. We kept, I will say honestly, we waited for a year for the other shoe to drop. That's what it felt like because we were waiting for it to get hard and it never did. You know, we just assumed that with product data and migrating any system, and it doesn't matter what that system does in a business sense, it always feels like it's going to be ten times more difficult and you're going to run into hurdles you never imagined. We had the opposite. This ended up being easier than we planned to. We also decided to keep both of those, uh, platforms running at the same time, our old system and our new system, which meant, and we did that for a full year, which meant that we had team members that of course put some data in one and some data in the other, which meant at the end of the year we ultimately had to reconcile and see what did people use more and how hard is it to compare one against the other. And yet again, we found it to be much easier than we'd expected. In fact, I believe the exact quote from our vice president of sales and my manager was, it's not going to be harder than that. When we had the missing product data, reload it, because, you know, the first time it was thousands of records. You know, it took a few minutes to load product in. We were anxiously waiting for the, you know, completed green light to show up and things. This time it was more of a set it, go grab a cup of coffee, come back and be surprised. It was already done. It's been very shockingly easy from, you know, from a business implementation standpoint, from a contractual standpoint, also cakewalk. Everything was done online. We received a, you know, a link to sign. We reviewed everything. We made a couple of edits in terms of dates that were just a little bit off here or there and kicked it right back. So the entire from incept from, I will say from planning to implementation through contracting and payment has been surprisingly easy. This is one of those rare occurrences in our industry, in the tech worlds,

Speaker A: where it just worked Absolutely. And transparency is really, uh, it's unique to find a lot of transparency in B2B relationships, right?

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, absolutely. I'm one of those people that if I find a partner that can really just understand that what I want from you is to manage my time as easily as possible. Right. We can be the best friends ever. But I'll do that with you after work, during the workday. I just want ease of use, and I want it to work, work. And I want a team I can count on. Right. And those are the partnerships that last. And I think Amber Engine has been fostering those with us, at least with us, since the very beginning.

Speaker A: I'm glad. I'm so glad to hear that. And given your, you know, again, your sort of uniquely involved understanding of PIM as a concept of managing product content, you know, sort of in aggregate, has your idea of the role that a PIM plays in an organization changed at all since working with Amber Engineering?

Speaker B: Yeah, positively. I mean, a year and a half ago at this time, I was in a very different role at an online marketplace. And, you know, what we would do is we would effectively be calling all day long to all of the different manufacturers out there and saying, give me your assortment. Give me your assortment. Give me your assortment. And I can tell you, I managed this category of product. I managed Howard Elliott at that company. At one point, I had that conversation with Howard Elliott, and I still didn't get product. Now here I am in the other chair, the person being asked for that. And, you know, the thing we always say is, we're a team of hustlers. We're going to get you that information faster than anybody else and in a more comprehensive way. And Amber Engine is the way we do that. That's our silver bullet and our secret.

Speaker A: Now, in terms of getting your team to adopt, right, And I understand you don't necessarily have a large department of individuals using the pim, but there's multiple users. Uh, how has that process been that change management? Have there been any roadblocks? Has it been fairly well received? Talk to me a little bit about your experience there.

Speaker B: Change management's always difficult, right? Every company, every person, myself included, suffer from paralysis. Paradigm paralysis, where you do what you like to do. Uh, our old PIM is being discontinued, so we have the advantage of sort of forcing our team along. Decisions made a little for you on our behalf. Uh, and it's gone down just this month. So in terms of adoption, I will say this. When it comes to Amber Engine, you can just throw a Login at someone and they can use it. You know a uh, basic looking at the tool makes you understand that this is a very advanced Excel sheet with some basic, very user friendly features. There are definitely advanced things like lists that could be made I think a bit easier and our team has given feedback on that, uh, uh, the cataloging and filtering and things like that that take a bit of training and I think that's where the adoption came in. Whenever it comes to a view only sort of level of adoption, we have people to jump in and say great, this is easy, I know how to use it. I don't need a follow up training session when it comes to okay, well maybe I need to send a spreadsheet, manipulate the data or delete a column from what I'm sending out before it gets out there. Build a view, build a filter, et cetera. That's where the training session had to come in. So for us it was really more a matter of here's everybody's login, go get the information you're already getting today. If it's not there, please let us know so that we can figure out how we're gonna load that information in Amber Engine. And at this point I think we've captured it all. But then really it was just let us know if you need anything more difficult and we'll train you. And those trainings have been very few and far between. In fact, I think besides myself and my team, who's one other individual, our E commerce specialist, Dustin. I think we've only completed one or two.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: Everybody just natively been able to use

Speaker A: the data and are these trainings, you're saying that they're connecting with the Amber Engine team and getting trained or are you saying you're comfortable enough in the platform now that you and Dustin can even train your team?

Speaker B: Yeah, we've definitely done both. But in this case for us, we typically set up and manage the views, the filters and things for our team here just for ease and understanding. There's no sense in teaching 10 people to do it because then 10 people put their spin on our data. Whereas we like these, keep that a bit centralized between the two of us. So we'll typically create that for them and then it's just a, uh, hey, here's what we've done and how it works and now you can go in to turn on this filter, this view, this whatever for yourself. Here's how you do so. So we typically foster that in 30 minutes or less.

Speaker A: Well Derek, I'm really, really glad to Hear you know that the experience your team has had is that the tool is intuitive. It really doesn't require extensive training. Because at the end of the day, what a lot of other PIMs that we've found in the past have. Have had at fault is that it's built with the IT user in mind. It's built with the administrator in mind. It's not necessarily for, you know, the people that are on the E. Comm team, on the merchandising team developing the product who actually touch the content. So, um, I'm. I'm glad to hear that that was your experience. Now, taking this whole conversation that we've had in aggregate, what would you say has been the biggest benefit to your business from working with Amber Engine and with our pimp?

Speaker B: Yeah, speed and manipulation. For us, it's really been the ability to do whatever. Right. I mean, we all know that there's been a task in your career. And I'm not saying this has happened at Howard Elliott. Uh, I'm saying this has happened in my career where you're asked to do something that might be completely out of the norm or maybe something you don't understand or something unusual. Amber Engine allows us to do those things very, very quickly and easily and without affecting our data permanently. We're able to import and, you know, tailor, make our data in any which way we need, or create a channel or create a filter or a view, or even just append data to columns and then later remove it very quickly. Or even if we were to, say, want to measure a column of data for accuracy. Amberengine is very, very effective at letting you do that. Let me give you an example. For instance. Uh, you know, new attributes get opened all the time on marketplaces or new requirements, and things change. And what will happen is we'll get a. Hey, your entire catalog needs to know if it meets this requirement and we need it back this week. Well, it used to be all hands on deck, fumbling through their portal, whereas now we can open up a new column and say, you know, if this, then that does the criteria meet, and then have Amber Engine score our data for us to give us those answers. To be able to really be able to turn back to that marketplace and say, nope, we're all ready to go. Happy to be your first and fastest to give that information. You know, what else do you need from us? So it's been a great tool for us in terms of agility.

Speaker A: I'm so glad to hear that. But now, taking this and flipping it on the Other side. Right. What, if anything, do you dislike about Amber Engine? Putting it a different way, if someone, a professional, personal contact of yours came and said, hey, we're evaluating pims, we've heard about this company, Amber Engineering. Give it to me dry. What is the cut and dry? What is the thing that I should be most aware of when I go into that evaluation?

Speaker B: Sure. You said it yourself, right? A lot of the times things get designed with an IT mindset. Uh, there are feature overloads that happen in Amber Engine. Whereas, for instance, filters, views, uh, are different. Uh, there are two separate places. So in order to be able to do one function, and oftentimes I have to turn on two different places within the data, whether that be at the top of the left section or whether that be in the far right, I have to go to two places. I don't know if I'm a smart, dumb person or a dumb, smart person, I don't think I want to know. So please don't fill me in. But, you know, that always ends up being difficult for me to reconcile in my brain that I have to go to two different places to apply two filters. Whereas in, say, like a common tool, people would be used to, like an Excel of the world, you can apply a filter, go into the same column, and apply the same filter. Now, I wouldn't say that's a better experience, but I would say it's a more familiar one. And I think the jump to the way Amber Engine does it can be a little bit confusing.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: Hey, that's.

Speaker A: That's fair enough. Um, well, Derek, I want to be conscientious of your time. I am so appreciative that you made the time to come and speak to us. We appreciate you and Howard Elliot, as of a part partner, so much more than you can possibly understand. Uh, and hopefully we can have you on again in 6, 8, 12 months, and we can talk about all the additional amazing experiences that you've had and the results that the business has seen from our partnership.

Speaker B: Well, I have no shortage in words. Anytime you need anything from me, just holler, I'm here.

Speaker A: Awesome, Derek. Thank you so much. That's it for this episode of E Commerce with coffee, powered by Amber Engine. If you haven't gotten your fix yet, be sure to get more E Commerce brand secrets on our website@, uh, amberengine.com and don't forget to subscribe for more episodes.