Speed and maneuverability can be everything in seasonal retail—just ask Evergreen Enterprises.

If the Northwestern University Wildcats get into college football’s coveted Rose Bowl, for instance, Evergreen quickly passes to its team of sales reps to score orders of Wildcats licensed merchandise like flags and jerseys, says John Toler, Evergreen’s president.

But, he says, there’s a lot involved in booking orders and getting those orders fulfilled, in effect crossing the goal line from a business perspective.

Evergreen designs most of the 15,000 SKUs it sells, ranging from license sports merchandise for several professional leagues as well as college teams to home décor, apparel and furniture. It then contracts with Chinese factories to produce the goods. Each season brings new styles and hot items. “Our products are seasonal and have a fashion element, so the SKU mix is always changing,” Toler says.

With more than 90% of its sales going to businesses—many of them independently owned home-and-garden centers—Evergreen must allow its business customers to order months ahead of the targeted season, and still give them confidence the ordered merchandise will sell when the season arrives. “Our Evergreen merchandise team and our customers try to figure out what to order in January that will ship in August for the fall season,” Toler says.

Evergreen also processes a small but increasing percentage of sales through its B2B portal at MyEvergreen.com, and it does some retail sales through the sports merchandise site FansWithPride.com and the home furnishings and gifts site GiftedLiving.com. But the lion’s share continues to go through its team of some 175 sales reps across North America.

Processing orders through sales reps, however, hasn’t always been as effective as it is today, Toler says. Up until a few years ago, reps relied mostly on paper catalogs to show customers products planned to be available in coming seasons, but the actual likelihood that any particular would be available was usually unknown, Toler says.

That changed when Evergreen rolled out the Spotlight mobile application a few years ago from Whereoware, a provider of e-commerce and mobile commerce technology and services. The Spotlight app—which integrates with Evergreen’s home-grown enterprise resource planning system for managing inventory, financials and other operations—shows the up-to-date availability of each SKU, including expected production and delivery of items from China not yet in stock in Evergreen’s warehouses.

That gives customers greater confidence that Evergreen can deliver seasonal products  months after customers book them, Toler says. “They can count on us for delivering 95% to 100% of booked orders,” he says. That, in turn, has reduced the number of B2B customers calling Evergreen’s contact center to inquire about orders, reducing Evergreen’s operating costs, he adds.

Evergreen is continuing to build on the value it gets from the Spotlight app, including adding information that reps can share with B2B buyers on how well particular types of products are selling in particular markets, Toler says.

“The problem we have with 15,000 SKUs is that, if you’re a hardware store in Evanston, Ill., how do you know which of those SKUs you should order?” he says. “But our sales reps can tell you what sells well in hardware stores in northeastern Illinois.”

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