Laddawn.com : Brand-It

Since I started working at Laddawn, I have always heard - "Almost all of our customers have Brand-It enabled on their account".

But throughout the years, I've been on the receiving end of some very tough conversations with our customers.

• • "Why is my customer telling me 'Laddawn's' name, is written all over the box?"
  • "I'm in the checkout process and I see 'Laddawn' on the label preview - do you mean to tell me all of my orders have had 'Laddawn' on them?"

A couple weeks before Laddawn had adopted the new labeling standard - we contacted our customers who were not enrolled with "Brand-It" and informed them of the upcoming changes that would be affecting them.

• • After XX/XX/XX date, orders would ship baring the Laddawn name - regardless of who the order was being shipped to.
    

This change freighted many customers (and Laddawn employees), and some chose to "opt-in" to "Brand-It" at that time.  But that wasn't always the case...

• If the customer had never placed an order with us (or hadn't in a while), their response typically was "When I place an order with you down the road, I'll look into Brand-It at that time".
• Some attempts to contact a customer, never resulted in any real conversation. (Example: Email / Voice Mail, typically resulted in one-way communication that went no where)
• Customer may have shown interest in "Brand-It" but wanted to 'speak it over with someone first' and since then the ball was dropped.
• Customer may have shown interest in "Brand-It" but never sent you their logo and/or confirmed what information they wanted on the label.

The information below, highlights some very interesting statistics along with my suggestions of what I think the future of "Brand-It" should be.

These charts show the distribution of label selections during the checkout process. (Example: My Brand-It / My Customer's / Laddawn / Third Party)

In the beginning part of 2015, we started showing live label previews on Laddawn 2.0.

As you can see, there was a clear transition of customers (and Laddawn employees) moving away from the use of Laddawn's label. Some customers opted into our Brand-It program at that time, while others chose to use Third Party labels. In the months there after, adoption of our Brand-It program has steadied - while the use of Third Party labels has slowly increased each month.

Notice how the use of "Ship To" Brand-It (My Customer's) labels, are non-existent. Naturally this number would be low, because our distributors typically sell to end users. But there's a large portion of our customers who sell to distributors too. The My Customer's label, should be higher than the single digits it's averaging each month.

In the past 5 months (Jan 2016 - May 2016), on average 1,039 orders (each month) bare the Laddawn name.

Out of those orders, I was curious how many were being shipped to the distributor and how many were being shipped to the end user. On average, 54% of all orders that bare Laddawn's name end up going to the End User.

It might not be fair to assume, "Our customer knows this and is fine with it". We already know, there's a large subset of customers who never visit Laddawn 2.0 and choose to send in their orders via email and/or fax.

The real purpose of our Third Party label, is just that - for "Third Parties".

For example:

• • ABC Packaging > ABC Packaging Inc. = Not a Third Party
  • ABC Packaging > (Blank) = Not a Third Party

On average, 80% of Third Party labels are not actually Third Parties. Over time, our Third Party label has become the "catch all" of labels.

Out of those orders which selected "Third Party" and were NOT in fact a real Third Party - they were either blank labels or mock Brand-It (Bill To / Ship To) labels. The use of a 'mock' Brand-It label was because...

For Brand-It Customers:

• • Our customer wanted to change their label (Example: ABC Packaging > ABC Packaging Inc.)
  • Our customer wanted to add their part #
  • etc...

For non Brand-It Customer:

• • Our customer did not want to use a Laddawn label
  • Our customer created their own Brand-It label
  • Our customer created their Ship To's Brand-It label
  • Our customer wanted to add their part #
  • etc...

Or they just simply wanted a blank label...

Out of 43,806 accounts, 6,020 have placed an order with Laddawn since 2011.

Out of 6,020 accounts, 4,291 have placed an order since 2015. (we'll call those "Active Accounts")

Out of 4,291 Active Accounts, 1,895 have opted into Brand-It.

In looking at the charts above, you can see that the majority of our Active Accounts - do NOT have Brand-It enabled on their account.

At first, that seems odd - because the majority of orders that leave our warehouse do in fact have Brand-It labels. But that is because, many companies are placing multiple orders - therefor giving the illusion that most of our customers have Brand-It,... when they don't.

In reviewing all of the labels, I decided to re-categorize them based on what the customer 'should have' selected - if they had no hurdles in front of them.

For example:

• • • Some customers want a blank label, so they are forced into selecting "Third Party" and leaving the fields blank.
    • Some customers wanted to revise their Brand-It label (not realizing we have the Header feature), some wanted to add tag lines, and/or part numbers.
    • Some customers wanted to create a Brand-It label for their Ship To.

After reviewing all of this data, I propose we loose the notion of our customers 'opting into' our Brand-It service.

"Brand-It" is our custom labeling program, that is offered to everyone. Customers who have not 'opted into' Brand-It, would receive a textual based Brand-It label - customized with their company information. The only question would be, did they update their label to include their company logo.  Whether they updated it or not, it still would be considered their Brand-It label.

The same would also apply for Ship To's (My Customer's) label.

Where it stands today, our customer has to jump through hoops to either 'opt-in' or to simply revise their label. The whole process could run much smoother, if we simply just give Brand-It to everyone.

In addition to that, I propose we stop using the verbiage "Third Party" because there is a lot of confusion over who's the Third Party depending on your point of view. Instead, we should allow the user to select a "Custom Label" - (think of a 'free form' label) in which, they can type whatever they want. (Yes, this could become the 'new' catch all label - but it may be unlikely to happen if everyone has Brand-It and we allow for the customer to easily update their label when need be)