PromoShop | BDA | CorpLogoWare
CorpLogoWare, LLC
OrderStream Pro is the next generation of an order management solution we originally custom designed for a promotional products distributor, CorpLogoWare (CLW).
CLW was a provider of high quality, cost-effective, custom imprinted products for corporate events, promotions, gifts and workplace apparel. Customers received personalized service from account executives who developed creative solutions to their needs. Products were sourced world-wide in order to find the least costly manufacturer, while meeting agreed-upon quality and design standards.
CLW’s orders flowed through a number of channels, both B2B and B2C. A solution was required to bring all of these channels together in an integrated online system. This system would have two basic aspects: a public front end for marketing to, and receiving orders from, clients and customers, and a restricted back office for the full range of internal administrative activities.
| multiple storefronts |
 |
CLW's own clients included many major Fortune 500 companies on whose behalf they inventoried and sold merchandise to customers, employees, dealers, franchisees and others. Accordingly, they required the ability to present multiple storefronts to the public, each individually white-labeled with a particular client’s corporate identity. Each of these storefronts would have a completely distinct graphical look and feel, and each would be functionally unique in the following respects (among others):
- products offered
- pricing and minimum quantities
- approval requirements
- restricted or unrestricted access to the general public
- enabled payment methods (credit card, open account, gift certificates, discount coupons and / or reward points)
- tax exposure
- enabled shipping methods and automated S & H calculation
- inventoried vs. drop-shipped merchandise
- storefront-specific libraries of pre-defined images available for imprinting
Visit some sample CLW storefronts:
PowerBar
Ernest Hemingway Collection
Nike Co-Branding Program
| “an order is an order” |
|
Despite these differences, all orders generated by means of these storefronts were expected to come together in a shared administrative interface, and yet remain effortlessly sortable.
In addition, administrative staff would manually input another channel of orders (those produced by their sales force of account executives) into the back office directly. The great majority of these orders would be for products not recorded in CLW’s own online catalog. Consequently, the administrative interface they used to place orders had to accommodate not only products with well defined properties, but also products that would have to be defined from scratch, from one order to the next.
CLW’s principle that “an order is an order”, regardless of its content or origin, guided the unification of their requirements.
| multi-level administrative access |
|
Another top priority was the ability to restrict administrators’ access to Back Office data according to customizable criteria. The Back Office would be used by several different kinds of actors, including system administrators, division managers, production coordinators, account executives and individual store administrators. Each of these users required access to all and only the data that “belonged” to them. In order to satisfy this requirement we designed a web of logical relationships among various record types and the actors who would be accessing them. Orders belong to accounts, accounts belong to account executives and to stores, account executives belong to production coordinators and to divisions. Using these relationships, the database could be filtered appropriately for every possible type of administrator.
| wired for business |
|
One of the greatest advantages of doing business over the web is that any location with an internet connection is potentially an office or point of sale. CLW’s sales and administrative network was distributed across 22 states and Canada. Account executives submitted orders from the field and many production coordinators worked from home.
Suppliers, fulfillment houses and clients are also coming online. CLW’s web-based solution communicated with its equipped business partners to drive order fulfillment electronically. Daily exports of accounts payable and accounts receivable integrated with their Microsoft Great Plains accounting software. Integration with client applications was also possible, such as with Hilton’s HHonors point redemption program. Customers could redeem their HHonors reward points for merchandise using a customized CLW storefront.
| designed for growth |
|
CLW asked Vortex to design and develop their web presence when their company existed only as a concept. Within a little over three years it had grown into a $40 million / year e-commerce operation ranking in the top 40 of the industry. During this period, CLW’s business model underwent many course corrections in order to capitalize on sudden opportunities. Ongoing site development needed to be supple enough to shift course with the company, with a minimum of waste. It is all too easy to over-focus on the short term without allowing for the uncertainties of the long term, and as a result, to design a solution that is too narrow and / or too brittle to adapt – except by means of band-aids that quickly add up. Throughout the CLW project, our designs respected long-term flexibility and expandability as a top priority. The result has been a system that has undergone remarkably few growing pains despite the intense pace of development and a frequently moving target.
| a clear advantage |
|
In the larger picture, the first generation of OrderStream Pro set the standard in the promotional products industry. While the competition makes do with fragmented, desktop-based legacy systems, CLW became well equipped to make good on its promise: “Quite simply, we are creating a new standard that is the easiest, fastest and least expensive way to buy custom imprinted merchandise.”
Since then, Vortex Business Software has gone on to create the newest, most powerful generation of OrderStream Pro and license the technology to several top performers in the promotional products industry.
previous: Case Study: BDA
