Retailer Black Diamond is trading in its 300-plus page workbook for an app.

The outdoor apparel and equipment retailer knew its selling system was antiquated and it had to join the mobile age, says Eric Wynn, marketing director of Black Diamond Equipment Ltd.

The majority of Black Diamond’s $150 million in annual sales are business to business sales, Wynn says. The company depends on 49 sales representatives to show products to buyers via a printed workbook that it publishes for the spring and fall.

And so, for three months twice a year, Black Diamond has a full-time employee producing the 300-page book. Per year, Black Diamond incurs about $300,000 in printing costs, Wynn says. Once the book prints, Black Diamond always finds errors, such as a product number changes or dropped or added products, Wynn says. Since the retailer can’t guarantee the information in the workbook is correct, the costly book isn’t a valuable tool, Wynn says.

“We do all this work with the season, twice a year, and immediately as soon as we print it, there are shortcomings,” Wynn says. “It’s outdated, things change and we find errors.”

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To make the changes it needs, Black Diamond has put all of the workbook’s information into a mobile app. The app also has additional materials, such as videos of the products and 3-D CAD drawings. Not only is the app a smaller, lightweight visual aid for reps, but it will also have the most up to-date product information and prevents reps from submitting orders for products that are no longer available.

Black Diamond, however, didn’t want to make too drastic a change too quickly for sales reps and so printed a 90-page abbreviated workbook for this season, Wynn says. The reduced workbook eliminated brand storytelling and moved from having one to two products per page to around five products per page, he says. Black Diamond has 463 SKUs. The goal is to eventually eliminate any printed workbook, Wynn says.

“We are not disrupting their work; we are slowly edging them to something more efficient,” Wynn says.

The sales representatives can’t place orders in the app, but Black Diamond will add this functionality within a year, Wynn says.

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“The first thing the reps asked was when can we place orders on it,” Wynn says.

The retailer worked from January until May producing the app and recently unveiled it to sales reps, Wynn says. Black Diamond worked with mobile app development firm Blink Worldwide to create the app and Adobe Experience Manager Mobile for the software in the app that connects to Black Diamond’s inventory system.

Wynn would not disclose the cost of developing the app nor Adobe’s annual licensing fee for the software. However, with these costs factored in, Black Diamond expects to save $500,000 over the next three years now that it doesn’t have to print the large workbook, Wynn says.

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