David Feinleib: My guest on today’s show is Dawn Powell, manager of e-commerce at Kids2. Kids2 is making parenting a little easier, one tiny win at a time, with an innovative line of holistic solutions for early-stage parents that cross borders, categories, and aisles. At Kids2, Dawn manages e-commerce, including the digital shelf, product content, and sell sheet solutions for the sales and marketing teams, among other things.
Before Kids2, Dawn was the e-commerce marketing coordinator at Kyocera Precision Tools and e-commerce operations manager at Rightline Gear. I had the privilege of meeting Dawn at the Digital Shelf Summit earlier this year, and I’m thrilled to have her on the podcast today. We talk about Kids2, Dawn’s path through e-commerce, and how Kids2 is using creative workflow automation to accelerate sell sheet creation for its sales team, and save money in the process.
Dawn, welcome to the show.
Dawn Powell: Hi Dave, it’s good to see you.
David Feinleib: Thanks for taking the time to do this. Would you start us out by telling us how you got your start in the space?
Getting Her Start: From a Bead Business to E-Commerce
Dawn Powell: I got my start in e-commerce a long time ago. I owned a bead business at one point, and I wanted a website, so I taught myself how to build one and started doing e-commerce that way.
David Feinleib: Tell us about the bead business, how did you get started with that? What’s the origin story?
Dawn Powell: I’ve always been some kind of crafter or artist. I did a lot of embroidery at the time, then started getting into beads, and that hobby led me into owning a business, a bead store, where I sold beads and traveled up and down the East Coast doing shows.
David Feinleib: I love it, a fellow entrepreneur, and a great story on in-store and e-commerce both. Tell us a little about Kids2, you’ve got a great line of products, several of which I’ll tell you are household names in our home, like the Baby Einstein line. What drew you to the company?
About Kids2 and What Drew Her to the Company
Dawn Powell: This is my second time around working for a children’s products company. When I was younger, I worked for a company that sold children’s clothes at retail, and then I joined Kids2 coming up on three years ago now. We have a really innovative line of products, we try to innovate and develop solutions for new parents to help keep babies happy, whether that’s through toys or gear. We try to tackle a bit of it all and pull it into a cohesive line that fits with your home and your baby’s lifestyle, growth, and development.
David Feinleib: It’s such a great line, fun and educational, and it has such a great place in our home. Tell us about e-commerce at the company, and what you’re focused on.
Managing Salsify and the Digital Shelf at Kids2
Dawn Powell: My main focus is our product information management system. I work with our Salsify program, I’m our Salsify admin, I suppose that’s my other title. That led me into working with data and with solutions that automate processes for Kids2, so we can get our content out faster to our retailers, and get our content to our sales team so they can get our products out there.
David Feinleib: Product information management has become such a big category. What are some of the other systems and pieces of technology you think about in this space?
Dawn Powell: We have to get our content out to our retailers, so in my role I have to understand not just managing data, but how our retailers want to receive that data, and what their expectations are. I came into e-commerce with a lot of experience across diverse retailers, I’ve worked with Amazon and Walmart at past manufacturing companies, so I have an understanding of what our end goal is, and that gives me a good basis for managing our data systems to get where we need to be.
David Feinleib: So this intersection of having the right data, but also that customer perspective, you’re uniquely positioned to bring both of those together, which is great. When we first started talking, we were talking about sell sheets. Would you tell us a little about what those are, and the business need behind them?
What Sell Sheets Are and Why They Matter
Dawn Powell: We use sell sheets to get information to our distributors and retailers. Our sales team uses them in particular when they’re visiting a retailer or a distributor, whether it’s a big company or a smaller one. They’re information sheets with pictures and our key insights and benefits for the products, and they change throughout end-to-end development, they get touched many times as information changes. So moving off our old solution, which was PowerPoint and manual edits, and into using Salsify data, was a pretty natural step for us.
David Feinleib: How did that process work before, was it designers, an agency, how did you build those sheets without a solution in place?
The Manual Process Before Automation
Dawn Powell: We have a sales admin team that works with each of our divisions, and they were the ones hands-on managing that information. When they got an update, they’d have to open the sell sheet, make the edits, copy and paste them across the line if items were similar. If an onboard ship date changed, they’d have to change that manually. Lots of changes involved a lot of touching, and then a lot of effort tracking which sheets had been updated so the sales team knew when new versions were available. A lot of manual process, which working with It’s Rapid has really helped solve for us.
David Feinleib: So we’ve got this shift from a manual process to an automated one. What other solutions were you looking at, and how did you come across working with us?
Dawn Powell: We’d looked at other integrations with other providers for sell sheet information. Some of that was limited. We’d looked at exporting information into a spreadsheet with a connection into PowerPoint, which was pretty clunky. So we approached it from a couple of different angles, but nothing quite fit all the boxes or let us change things on the fly.
David Feinleib: This idea of using PowerPoint is really helpful context, we have customers using PDFs, customers using PowerPoint. Can you talk about why sales and marketing teams tend to use the PowerPoint versions?
Why PowerPoint Still Matters for Sales Teams
Dawn Powell: We’re often addressing different markets, so our sales team might be working on something specific for a market or a specific retailer, and being able to open the PowerPoint and make a few tweaks where needed makes things much easier. The PowerPoint file is available right in Salsify, they can download it, and convert it to a PDF from there if they want to.
David Feinleib: Often when we work in this space, we focus heavily on the data going into the sell sheets. One thing you pointed out to me, which was such a great insight, is that there’s a human element in how these sheets are used, and in how they’re designed. Can you talk about the people behind the data?
The Human Element Behind the Data
Dawn Powell: We want our sales team selling, not editing. We have sales coordinators who help manage the sell sheet process, creating them and sending them back into Salsify to manage. We don’t want a sales team member spending time on a lot of edits, so when there’s an overall, scaled edit, having a special property in Salsify that we can bulk import and export makes it manageable. I want my sales team out there making us money, not acting as a data analyst or a graphic designer.
David Feinleib: That’s the interesting intersection for me with sell sheets, you’ve got a design element, the salespeople, and the data, and hopefully we can bring all of that together into one solution for you.
David Feinleib: Can you also talk about the buy-in process? Any time you’re bringing in new tech or new capabilities, you have to socialize it and get people educated. What was that like?
Getting Buy-In Across Departments
Dawn Powell: It was different across departments. Our sales team was thrilled, they knew this would make things easy for them and get information to them right away. Some of our internal teams managing that data took a bit more walking through, showing them that they were already providing this information, just more manually, and that we were simply going to put it into a system for them. Once we proved that point, that you can put it on an Excel sheet, import it into Salsify, and the information is there, that you can go right into Salsify for that product and edit it, it became a matter of helping people see the improvement to their process.
David Feinleib: Really well said. A lot of potential customers I talk to worry that their data isn’t perfect, and my instinct is that data is almost never perfect, it’s always evolving. How do you think about the data itself, keeping it updated, and the workflow that makes sure what you have presents well when the team is out selling?
Keeping Data Current and Building the Right Workflow
Dawn Powell: I agree, data is never perfect, it’s always evolving and changing, whether that’s written content or images, we’re always looking to improve it. The nice thing we’re able to do with Salsify is maintain a controlled set of properties used specifically for the sell sheet, so we can set up a trigger, when that content changes, our sales coordinator knows a new sell sheet needs to be created. They go into It’s Rapid, and at the click of a button, pull the information over and send the sell sheet back to Salsify. Our whole sales team can get a notice when a sell sheet is updated, if they’ve set up their own notification.
David Feinleib: Another thing I learned from working with you is how to present the investment in the data itself. You taught me that a little bit of data has a really high return when you consider everything you can do with it, sell sheets being just one of those outputs. Can you talk about socializing that idea with the team?
Proving the ROI
Dawn Powell: We have over 250 users in Salsify, so they’re already familiar with getting data from Salsify, familiar with it as a source, and it was easy to socialize the idea that we already had the information there, they were already grabbing it, and we were just going to put it into something else that made life easier and created a workflow. It wasn’t as big a step to get buy-in once people realized we only had to add a bit more data to Salsify to generate what we were already computing, understanding where the data was coming from and what other properties were available, and saying, use this information here. Proving the value case, the number of hours we’d save getting information out, the ease of changing a template when we wanted a design change on our sell sheets, that’s what did it.
David Feinleib: You also told me about the business ROI, and I realize you probably can’t share exact numbers, but can you give us a sense of direction, maybe an order of magnitude, for the efficiencies and cost savings?
Dawn Powell: Sure, we looked at how many hours it took us on average per year to complete sell sheets, how often a given sheet was updated over a year, how long it normally took to find the sheet, open it, and make the edits every time. Looking at the savings from that, combined with the overall upgrade we did to our sell sheet format last year, we saw somewhere between forty and fifty thousand hours saved over the process, year over year. You can apply your own math to what that would save.
David Feinleib: That’s very significant, and we’re excited to be part of that efficiency and the great work you’re doing. One more question on sell sheets, then I want to ask about e-commerce more broadly. As you think about the different brands in the portfolio, one of the things we’ve done together is set up different logos, look and feel, and designs. How does that work across the different brands and the company?
Brand-Specific Templates and Look and Feel
Dawn Powell: We have a different look and feel for each brand, in terms of logo and colors used. Some things stay consistent, like the type fonts, but the colors used for headings and that kind of detail differ. It’s Rapid provided different templates to fit each of our brands and sub-brands, and it recognizes, based on the brand or sub-brand, which template is needed when we send the data over. So we don’t have to go pick a template ourselves, it knows this is Baby Einstein, use this template, and all the information shows up with those consistent details.
David Feinleib: Great use case for the platform, leveraging the categorization you already have in Salsify. As you think about automation more broadly, and everything you’re working toward over the next couple of years, what other applications are you thinking about?
What’s Next: Salsify Advance and AI
Dawn Powell: You’re going to challenge me on this one. Right now we’re in the middle of an upgrade to Salsify Advance, which is a big project for us, getting all the new capabilities in place, and that also involves working with your team to make sure we stay aligned as we make changes to our systems and how information flows back and forth. It’s Rapid has really helped address our challenges around the data and how we’re changing that information. I’d love to see us move further into using AI. That’s not really my call, since I’m not on the creative content side of things, but I can promote what I see out there that’s cool. I love it.
David Feinleib: No conversation today feels complete without thinking about AI, so it’s a great roadmap item. Dawn, we’ve covered a lot of great ground, from your backstory running your own business, to sell sheets, the data, and the people behind it all. I’d love to ask a couple of fun wrap-up questions. First, and I know it’s hard to pick just two, which two people have inspired you the most in your professional life?
Closing Thoughts
Dawn Powell: One is one of my first bosses, her name was Toby, when I worked in retail. She taught me a lot about thinking on my feet. We’d walk our retail store from front to back, taking notes as we went of things that needed to be addressed for the day, and I had to move to keep up with her and keep taking notes, and then turn those notes into an action plan for what needed to happen. She was very instrumental in teaching me those life skills.
Second would be someone I met when I was beginning my e-commerce career, a bead artist and entrepreneur who was doing the same thing I was, building her business, her website, and her reach to customers. She gave me guidance early on in translating retail experience into e-commerce. I think e-commerce is really nothing more than the actual selling you’d do in person, getting information to the customer, just in writing. Her name was Carol, and she helped me shift my view from one-to-one selling to reaching an audience through e-commerce, which has stood me in good stead throughout my career, because you’re basically doing the same thing, just in written form.
David Feinleib: Exactly, thinking on your feet, learning how to walk the store, and I suppose now how to walk the digital store too, and staying in touch with the customer and delivering the information they need. Such a great set of insights. When you get some time outside of work and family, what are your favorite hobbies?
Dawn Powell: I actually work a lot in animal rescue. I currently have five foster fail animals. I volunteer with our local animal rescue and foster animals periodically, the most recent being a Chihuahua that ended up staying.
David Feinleib: I love it, what a great story, and a wonderful thing to be doing, thank you for that. If our listeners want to find you online, what’s the best way to get in touch?
Dawn Powell: Probably LinkedIn would be the best way.
David Feinleib: Perfect. Dawn, I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you today, we covered a lot of great topics. Thanks for sharing your backstory, your journey, and the great work we’re doing together. We’re really appreciative of the opportunity to partner with you on sell sheets, and hopefully on more automation down the road. Thanks again, I hope you’ll come back soon.
Dawn Powell: I would love to.