Every order, from every channel, in one place

Ivan de Ramon (Convexity)

Well, Jayne, super good to be here. Thanks for your time. What about you do a little intro and tell us about, you know, you and your business, Pearls & Camo, everything.

Jayne

All right. Hi, I'm Jayne. I own Pearls & Camo. We are a five year old custom apparel business, and in year five, we decided to launch direct to consumer. So our biggest challenge has been keeping track of inventory, because our custom model has us drop shipping directly from the factory. So this has been our biggest hurdle to date, and we were lucky enough to meet the Convexity crew at Atlanta Apparel. And so we're just getting up and running to streamline things and make our lives a little easier.

Ivan de Ramon (Convexity)

Yeah, and I remember when we met as well, like, you know, you also gave us a chance like the small company doing things a bit different and stuff. And for us, it's super amazing to us where we have a small business and I feel like you guys particularly are also growing super fast and expanding also the different lines of the business. So why do you think also… Why was it important for you guys to keep inventory up to date and, and find like a streamlined way to create the sales orders and manage the inventory from different sites, etc.?

Jayne

Well, I think it's really important because you're missing sales if your inventory is not right, because we also use that inventory to write some wholesale orders off of the stock that we do have on hand. And as far as working with a smaller company, that was important to me, or I liked it for different reasons. We work with a really large order writing system right now. I would say it's the top order writing system in all of the gift industry and some apparel. But if you're not a really large company, you don't have any value to them, so you can't ever get anyone on the phone. You can't ever… If you have a question, no one will answer you. They will send you a video or maybe 10 videos, and sometimes it's just like a one minute question, and you just want someone to walk you through it or help you or change something, or help you maybe come up with a new way of doing things, and that's just not in the realm of how they work. So I feel like if we have a challenge or an issue that we are looking to solve, you're trying to figure it out with us, and obviously you're writing this as we go, as we're telling you what our needs are. And as we're getting further into the process and really ready to hit go, you have been able to adapt and like are really listening to what we are saying are sticking points and are actually thinking about how you could help us, not only with the order writing but with the whole process. So you're really looking to make our lives easier, and I think you really understand that a lot of small businesses, they are their own bottleneck because they're doing everything. And we're just looking for the most efficient way, and it is really cost savings. You don't necessarily need a large team to get it done, but you need your processes in place. And so for us, that's been the biggest win.

Ivan de Ramon (Convexity)

Amazing. And I think we can say that before you were using MarketTime, which is the part that was a bit of a struggle in that way. And we have most of our customers are also like we're on MarketTime and now they're starting to use Convexity for all of that sales. And yeah, I'm glad to hear that also, you know, the kind of customer support is also one of, one of the big parts. I was actually gonna ask you like why did you choose Convexity over some of the others, but I think you kind of went over that, so that's amazing. And I guess I'm curious to hear kind of what's the kind of impact you're expecting when you want to see in your business using Convexity. Is it mainly time saving, is it being able to manage a larger business and kind of like the increased sales, or just operationally? Maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

Jayne

Well I think it’s all of it, right? Because time is money, so if I can save time, I can develop new products, I can work on the business. So it really… it's just not… you're not just saving money on the task that you're doing. It, like, frees you up to do other things, and obviously there are always opportunities, and we potentially have one of those opportunities right now where we could be expanding quickly. So it's important that everything is working smoothly, and it's streamlined, and that we can have that capacity to scale. And I think you guys are the same way. Like, you're looking to scale, and you just like, you know, figure it as you go and, there's really no… You know, it's just-- It's, being able to figure things out really.

Ivan de Ramon (Convexity)

Amazing, yeah. And another thing as well as you know, today we’ve been trying AI. We got you set up with, ChatGPT for using Convexity and access to inventory and updates. What do you think of AI? What are the areas where you think it can help your business the most, if any?

Jayne

Well, I, I mean, I think it can help in all areas. Like, and I think the more we use it, the more we're like, "Wow, that just took one minute and not three days." Or, you know, some of the challenges it has right now are, like, image generation or things like that. But I think the more we use it and the more it understands us as, like, a business and our tone of voice and our personality and what we're looking for, the more information we feed it, the better it gets. So I think, I mean, I think everyone should be using it, and I think just… we can't understand where it's going to be a year from now. We're, you know… So I think I'm glad we're on the bandwagon. I think it's amazing that it's tied into Convexity, and it's just gonna save so much time and energy there. We only tried one thing here which was stock. And it saved a tremendous amount of time. So I kind of can't even… I don't know. I'm having trouble, like, verbalizing what, what I think it's gonna do for me. But I… It's, like, definitely positive. It's, like, save so much time and energy and yeah, it's mind blowing.

Ivan de Ramon (Convexity)

And that's also one of the main things we wanted to build with Convexity is like, build a product that's both meant for humans but also meant for agents so the agents can very easily do some of this task that would take humans a long time.

Jayne

Wait, I just want to add one thing there. Like, especially for us, it's important because obviously we are the humans taking the orders, going to the shows, interacting with customers and all of that. But being custom, we have a lot of detail, and right now we are manually doing that. So the fact that we can incorporate AI and have one less person touching it. Obviously each time a person touches something, there's more room for error. So it's not just the time, it's just that error and just… That’s our biggest time constraint right now, and it’s just a constant process that we have week after week is sending these orders in. So that’s going to be amazing.

Ivan de Ramon (Convexity)

I'm super, super glad to hear. Yeah, and you know, and part of this process is I think what's been very nice about our relationship is that, you know, you will come to us with, a unique problem to your business or something, and from, our Convexity, you know, because we are a smaller company and we can adapt much faster, we were able to adapt our product to something that your specific process needed, which I guess compared to, like, a larger company, that's more difficult because you don't get the kind of attention. Could you tell us about the experience of, like, how has it been working with us or like, you know, how we've been dealing with some of the processes and adapting some of the product for you guys or some of that?

Jayne

For sure. I think at the very beginning it was just we had a lot of informational calls, like, "What are we doing? What are we selling? What does it look like? What's working? What's challenging? What would we like to change? What could make our lives easier?" And so you started writing the program, and then we would have another call and kind of go over, like, here's where we're at you know, what do we need to change, maybe get on, play with it. And one thing I do want to say is we were not in a huge hurry to get it up and running, so we kind of spread it out. And there was one point when we thought it might be pants on fire and you were there, like, "It's okay if your other system, if your contract is ending, like, tomorrow. Well, it's okay. We'll be up and running, and we'll do it." And we didn't need that, so we have been able… We've had the luxury of spreading it out. I think we both knew that we wanted to be using it, like, definitely by November so that we could have everything, all the little kinks ironed out by the time we got to market in January, which is our busiest time. So I think it's been great. Anytime I've gotten on and played with it and notice, like, oh, I wish it had this feature, or this would be helpful, or this maybe is missing, I just send an email and then it's like, "Okay, done," or, "Okay, this is fixed," or, "Oh, you're gonna love this next feature that's coming. We're working on this." So it's been really positive.

Ivan de Ramon (Convexity)

Amazing. Well, thanks so much. That's, that's pretty, pretty useful. Yeah, we're also super happy to work with you and excited to, you know, support you and the busiest time and with all the growth that's coming to Pearls & Camo, which we love as a brand. Thank you so much for your time and everything.

Jayne

Thank you. I'm glad we met.