Five years ago Violet “Vi” Warner was an attorney in America’s windy city, Chicago, Illinois. Her career focused on finance and was thriving. As a way to cope with the stress and demand of her career, Warner began exploring activities outside of work to take her mind off her day-to-day work responsibilities.
A beginner’s class led to additional classes that enhanced both her knowledge, skills and passion for letterpress.
The more time Warner spent with letterpress, the more hooked she got. It didn’t take long for her to realize she had a natural talent for letterpress and that her career interests were shifting more and more away from the law to letterpress. Before long, she was practicing law full time and founding a letterpress business that she ran by night out of her home. It also didn’t take long for her to realize that she couldn’t keep burning both ends of the wick for very long.
In 2015 she decided to focus exclusively on her letterpress business and moved her operations to Longmont, Colorado. For Warner, being a business owner was rewarding and challenging. She quickly realized two things, she needed help and better technology to help her keep up with the ever-increasing administrative demands associated with owning and running a business.
“Our invitation business isn’t like many others,” explained Warner. “We offer such a fully custom experience, that we can’t really be compared with sites like Minted or Zazzle. We even allow couples to schedule time to come in and watch us print their invitations by hand or press a few themselves!”
Too Much Administrative Work and Not Enough Time to Grow Her Business
At Violet Press, Warner provides every aspect of greeting cards from creation, production and selling. She also produces personalized wedding invites. She loves both sides of the business even though they have different customers and have completely different business needs, including software solutions to run her business on a day-to-day basis.
“We take customer experience very seriously.” said Warner. “A wedding is such an amazing experience and we want couples to feel like they get what they need from us. Perhaps they want to be super involved in the details, we’re good with that. Or perhaps they are too busy and stressed to sweat the small stuff, and they want us to handle assembling, mailing, etc. and we are good with that, too.”
As new business needs came up, Warner would Google for solutions or ask other business owners what they used. It didn’t take long before she had a wide array of methods and technology tools that all solved one specific problem but lacked the ability to integrate together. Part of her arsenal included manual inventory with post it notes, a white board and free software solutions. It didn’t take long before she found herself manually entering data and inventory that quickly added up and ate into her time and ability to create and produce products.
As Warner gained clients and achieved higher levels of success, she found she needed a better customer relationship management (CRM) tool to help take her business to the next level. She chose Zoho One for her finance and production tools.
Integrating CRM, Finance and Production
With Zoho One Warner can integrate her CRM with both finance and production tools. These types of tools have increased in usage this year from 56% to 74% and Warner found CRM tools to be very helpful. Her biggest priority was to identify a way to eliminate repetitive tasks such as adding customer info over and over again every time they advanced through her system. She desperately wanted to streamline the process so she could track each customer throughout their entire relationship with the company.
With her new CRM system, Warner runs her business on an integrated platform that enables her to manage a wide variety of critical functions including customer management, production, finance, inventory and marketing. Additionally, her CRM system allows her customers the ability to design their own event invitations even while COVID-19 has been disrupting events. Warner is now able to more effectively manage her workload, and has increased her client base to more than 200 retailers, including a national chain and the addition of a new storefront. The increased client base has been great, but Warner says the time saved dealing with administrative responsibilities has been invaluable.
Warner’s custom work became far simpler to manage when she was able to handle custom orders entirely through her CRM app. In any sales organization, deals are the most important records to generate the real revenue for the organization. In most businesses, all deals have to undergo a complete sales cycle, which starts with identifying the hot prospect and ends with prospects being won or lost. The activities within this sales cycle that have to be completed include; sending product information to deals, product demonstrations, sending sales quotations and business negotiations.
Another big benefit for Warner is the added ability to more efficiently track customer data. She can also keep track of wholesale greeting cards, specifically how many cards she has and streamline production. Rather than making cards individually, Warner can be more efficient and search inventory to identify when stock is low on more popular cards and print larger runs of these cards.
With Zoho One, Warner’s able to spend less time on production and administrative tasks.
“When making a new batch of cards, I can easily run reports to see what my best sellers were in the past and plan ahead to make sure I have plenty of those cards in stock so I’m not wasting time and resources on inventory that isn’t selling,” said Warner. “Another added benefit is that I’m able to focus on my most popular products and designs which enables me to eliminate the cards that aren’t selling as well and avoid losing revenue by making sure popular cards are kept in stock. The process of tracking commission has gone from a manual process to all online where I have immediate access to commission data and can simply create and track an invoice report automatically. ”
With a complete software platform to back her up and save time, Warner is able to focus her attention on expanding the custom order side of her business while moving to a more pedestrian-heavy area.
Greeting the Future
“We are seeing trends toward micro-weddings,” concluded Warner. “Even before COVID, couples were starting to decide to go all out on a small wedding of 50, rather than a large wedding of 200. This allows them to have all the extravagant details they couldn’t afford with a large guest list. I think this trend will continue especially in light of COVID restrictions on size of gatherings.”
“A lot of customers want a custom experience when designing and selecting their wedding invitations, but their budget requires them to use sites like Minted.com,” said Warner. “These sites require that couples choose a pre-designed template. They do not work with a dedicated designer and aren’t able to customize fonts, illustrations or even lines of text to really make it their own. We give this custom experience to our customers at a similar price point, sometimes even less! In this way, couples don’t have to choose between budget and experience. We solve that dilemma for them.”
For Warner, having a complete business platform has been essential to her ability to streamline her business so she can and focus on doing what she loves.
