Robeka

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP at a kosher food media company that’s owned by one of the largest food distributors in North America. We function as our parent company’s media arm.

What challenge were you trying to address with Robeka?

We needed to build a customizable website to run a competition for user-generated content. We thought about integrating it into our main website, but it would’ve been too complicated and have taken too much work, time, and money. Robeka built a WordPress site to handle that need.

What was the scope of their involvement? 

We hired Robeka to develop the WordPress site that we use for user-generated content. Our team defined the business goals, and they did the design and execution. Since then, it’s become our flexible, all-purpose website for competitions. We’ve used it again and again.

We’ve also hired Robeka for additional projects since then, including a B2B site for our parent company. For that project, the previous site was built by another vendor and hadn’t been updated since 2004. It was in terrible shape and had even gotten hacked. 

Robeka redesigned the site from scratch on WordPress. The solution drew from an internal database of all of our products, so they had to figure out the right things to display along with the appropriate filters. For example, things that were in stock but not in certain stores yet nor private labels.

Now, we’re in the middle of another project to build an e-commerce site on Shopify.

What is the team composition? 

Matthew (CEO) is our main point of contact.

How did you come to work with Robeka?

Our CEO is very friendly with the CEO of a smaller e-commerce company and asked who’d built their website. That’s how we found out about Robeka.

How much have you invested with them?

Across all of our projects, we’ve spent between $50,000–$200,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started our initial project in January 2020, which wrapped up in a few weeks. We’re still working with them on other projects.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We just have positive feedback for their work. They’re great about working through issues with us. Back in May 2020, we ran into one crash that became an epic legend of things that can go wrong. We were running a contest for kids to make videos in the middle of quarantine, which went insanely viral. Whereas we expected a couple of hundred entries, we got thousands and crashed the site. It was a good problem to have!

Matthew absolutely rolled with the punches to get us back on our feet. He got on late-night calls to hear our issues, upgraded the server, and made sure that everything went through. A big part of that meant figuring out how to host all of the videos that we hadn’t planned for. That made him very flexible and helpful throughout all of our challenges.

How did Robeka perform from a project management standpoint?

Robeka uses Basecamp for most but not all projects. That way, everything stays very organized. Matthew is also very communicative. If I have a question, I can just call or email him.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Matthew and his team are very knowledgeable. They have a lot of experience and can really recommend best practices and platforms for what we need. Additionally, the prices are reasonable for such a high level of service.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I can’t think of anything.