Built by Blank

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

The site has subtle interactions and the photography is presented in a nice way. It’s not a cookie-cutter Shopify website; it looks great and it’s functional.

Technology is a big part of what we do. We’re an apparel company but also a tech one, and we run a significant stack. Aside from e-commerce, we have a widely-read blog called Rangoli. Built by Blank helped us build that using WordPress and they’ve setup our customer service platform by analyzing other ones on the market. They’ve integrated Zendesk into our stack. We’ve looked at different documentation software, and chose Dropbox, which has been implemented on the backend of our operations.

We have numerous security mechanisms as well as many internal tools that help us be more efficient. We have a team in India, for which Built by Blank helped us analyze communications. They chose and installed Slack before it was a common platform.

Beyond the frontend elements like our blog, there are many things from an infrastructure perspective that needed to be solved. Instead of me trying to figure out which software needed to be used, I could call Built by Blank’s top people, have them analyze what’s available for our environment, come up with a solution and implement it.

How did Built by Blank perform from a project management standpoint?

Technologists have a tendency to move around a lot, but Built by Blank’s team has come to know our business and come up with good solutions. Projects were delivered on time, were managed well, and approached from a problem-solving perspective. Everything is managed on Basecamp.

What did you find most impressive about Built by Blank?

They have an ability to understand our problems, unlike other companies which I call “dumb technology firms,” that work strictly based off of briefs without really understanding the problem we’re trying to solve. We won’t always know the solution to a problem, but Built by Blank has done a good job of looking at it from a 360-degree perspective and applying their experience.

The solution can be a simple one at times, as opposed to going out and building a complicated product. For example, we wanted to build something called the “Recommendation Engine.” Many people use ERP systems for this, which are heavy, big, and have features that a small company may or may not require. For our system, we really needed an understanding of what people like and to have a recommendation engine which worked with the data we gathered on them. If Misty recently bought a blue shirt, there is a chance she might like some blue pants, and so on. Another technology firm would have recommended buying SugarCRM and spending six months to a year implementing it, but, in this case, we determined that each solution on the market was solving a different problem and none really suited what we were trying to do, so we should build our own recommendation engine with our own logic. This can be called AI, machine learning, or whatever we want to name it, but we essentially started writing code to solve our own problem. There are both boxed solutions like Slack and Zendesk that fit the case, but sometimes, there aren’t. For the latter, we need a partner who can make the decision. We would have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying an off-the-shelf ERP that wouldn’t even have helped us. Built by Blank was a true partner, and saved us a lot of time, hassle, and money. This is why we have such a long relationship with them.