The Backstory of the Creation of Surefront

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Table of Contents

1. Turning Retail Inside Out
2. The Buying Experience Today
3. Further Reading

Turning Retail Inside Out

Your new shirt’s journey

How did the new shirt you just bought make its way to the store? Every day, retail buyers make decisions that determine which products are available to you, the consumer. They work with their vendors to source or manufacture products, negotiate prices, and deliver them to your nearest store.

The Missing Threads

Our team embarked upon four months of human-centered research into the retail purchasing world, conducting interviews, contextual inquiries, empathy-building exercises, and other research activities. Our biggest takeaway: buyers’ decision-making processes are compromised by their current purchasing tools - email, stacks of printed sales data, Microsoft Excel, product offer PDFs, cameras, calculators - because these tools are unconnected, decontextualized, and require duplicated effort. Our challenge is to improve working relationships and processes between buyers and vendors, and the people supporting them.

Designing seamless buyer-vendor collaboration

Over the course of another four months, we iteratively prototyped and tested design ideas for a new type of buyer-vendor collaboration platform. We created Buying Time, a service-oriented platform for buyers and vendors to move from product offers to purchase orders efficiently and effectively, while having fun along the way.

The Buying Experience Today

For four months, we immersed ourselves in the fast-paced, complex world of retail purchasing—diving into buyers’ and vendors’ needs, desires, and processes. We learned that the current state of buying is not an enjoyable shopping experience: it's filled with spreadsheets and paperwork, not thrill. We relied on four research insights to make buying both fun and effective. 

Buyers can’t find the needle in the haystack. 

Buyers live and breathe products. However, to get a product’s full story, they have to cross-reference a muddled stack of sales spreadsheets, offers and meeting notes from vendors, and many other documents and emails. When a buyer transitions roles, getting up to speed on all this product information can take months (especially when half the information is lost to the previous buyer’s email account). 

Supporting Research Methods: Artifact Analysis, Contextual Inquiry, Competitive Analysis, Interviews.

Surefront centralizes, visualizes, and keeps a record of all products, allowing buyers to find the product-level information they need. 

Buyers struggle to put the puzzle together.

Buyers engage in many different "qualitative" activities: gathering insights from comp shopping, observing their customers in-store, and discussing trends with vendors. These activities, though critical to strategy, are typically very ad-hoc and unstructured. As it stands, most buyers work from a general gist of this information, rather than specifics, because it is too cumbersome to organize.

Supporting Research Methods: Interviews, Contextual Inquiry, Empathy-Building Activity, Survey.

Surefront helps organize insights into buying programs and easily communicate them with vendors. 

Purchase Orders are 20% work, and 80% headache. 

Communication challenges plague the current purchase order (PO) process. Issues between buyers and vendors can cause late shipments, missed opportunities, and strained relationships. This process is critical to retail buying, and improving it is our core focus—maximizing both buyer and retailer benefit, as well as value to LH Ventures.

Supporting Research Methods: Contextual Inquiry, Interviews, Artifact Analysis, Competitive Analysis.

Surefront service approach helps buyers feel decisive and empowered: they can now create a purchase order with one click. No more headaches. 

What Happened to the Thrill? 

Buying creates a unique high that is part shopping, part strategic gambling, and part competition. But now it’s followed by a low: the paperwork. A successful tool needs to lessen the lows without sacrificing the highs. It also needs to work both for in-person meetings and remote purchasing.

Supporting Research Methods: Contextual Inquiry, Interviews, Empathy-Building Activity, Card Sort, Survey.

Surefront is flexible. It works seamlessly when the buyer and vendor are meeting in-person or discussing products remotely. 

You don’t want your data to be siloed. Your company’s CRM, PIM and PLM solutions shouldn’t operate in a vacuum, either. Surefront is a unified product collaboration platform to power growth and ROI. Our patented PIM, CRM, and PLM solutions streamline the omni channel sales, merchandising and product development processes. By combining these essential functionalities, Surefront creates a single source of truth throughout your product lifecycle, sales and listing processes. 

The results? Up to 150% more revenue per employee and a 40% shorter product development cycle is just the beginning. Try our 10x ROI calculator to see your company’s potential profits. Or, skip the noise and book a custom demo with one of our unified product collaboration management experts today. The retail industry evolves quickly and has a lot of moving parts. We do all of the research, so you don’t have to. Stay ahead of market fluctuations, trends and new features by subscribing to our Unified Product Collaboration Management Blog.

Further Reading
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