In the Loupe
In the Loupe
From Zero to One, Let's Talk About Vendor Data
Mike shares how he's helping rebuild Punchmark’s Premium Vendor Program from a one-way data pipe into a two-way system that gives vendors and retailers real value. He discusses zero-to-one strategy, systems thinking, and practical steps to standardize data, deliver insights, and reduce friction.
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Welcome to In the Loop. What is up everybody? My name is Michael Burpo. Thanks again for listening to In the Loop. This week, an internal episode. So this week I want to talk about something I've been working on at Punchmark for the last just about five months or so. I was handed control and uh management of the Punchmark Premium Vendor Program. And I kind of wanted to talk about the program and also take a high-level view on how you can take a program that might be functioning in one direction and then overhaul it and set up infrastructure and systems and build new things and eventually try to monetize it. I think it's hopefully going to be an interesting conversation and look behind the curtain, but also talk about where Punchmark's role as this crossroads between retailers and vendors comes into play, and also talk about how to take something from zero to one, which is what I've kind of always specialized in at Punchmark. Some people go from one to a hundred really well, and I think I operate best going from zero to one, setting things up, what I call propping things up in a special operations way, and then handing it to someone else. So sit back, enjoy. Cheers.
SPEAKER_00:This episode is brought to you by Punchmark, the jewelry industry's favorite website platform and digital growth agency. Our mission reaches way beyond technology. With decades of experience and long-lasting industry relationships, Punchmark enables jewelry businesses to flourish in any marketplace. We consider our clients our friends, as many of them have been friends way before becoming clients. Punchmark's own success comes from the fact that we have a much deeper need and obligation to help our friends succeed. Whether you're looking for better e-commerce performance, business growth, or campaigns that drive traffic and sales, PunchMark's website and marketing services were made just for you. It's never too late to transform your business and stitch together your digital and physical worlds in a way that achieves tremendous growth and results. Schedule a guided demo today at punchmark.com slash go. And now back to the show.
SPEAKER_01:Okay everybody. So I want to talk about this premium vendor program and I want to make it interesting. So bear with me because I really am going to try to explain this from like a business strategy or like a design perspective instead of just talking about like what this program does. Because sometimes, like if you're just trying to get here for interesting jewelry stories, like how do I make this interesting to you as a business owner? So one thing I want to talk about, like I mentioned in the intro, is going from zero to one and then one to a hundred. And some people just have best better skill sets and are just better at certain parts of it. I think that uh some people I think that uh are better at like working inside of systems. They are uh system guys and like they are good at being told, okay, this is the process, this is how you plug in, this is you know, where you reference your reference sheet and you kind of go from there. I have some friends that are great at that. There's no nothing wrong with that. And honestly, I think that engineers are always uh pretty pretty strong at that. What I've always been good at, I think, and where I've kind of made my mark at Punchmark uh is going from zero to one for a bunch of things. Uh I've been at Punchmark for about eight and a half years now, and in my time here, I have done a lot of what I call special operations, and that I don't really have a clear defined role a lot of the times. And what happens is they give me an idea that is, I'm not gonna say half-baked, but like kind of like the early idea. And then they say, All right, Mike, can you make this happen? So here's an example. Uh, this podcast. My bosses wanted to have a podcast, and they they identify all the reasons. Okay, we want to have a podcast because we want to reach you know, retailers in a unique way. We want to stand out, we want to uh solidify ourselves as thought leaders, we want to help the industry, all those things. And it started out as a group collaboration, but it was such a heavy lift with so many people that eventually they kind of were like, all right, Mike, what can we do to make this actually work without being painful? And I had to go ahead and all the decisions that you might not see in the background come into play. So working with our editor and working with our um, like what are the what's the layout going to be? How do you structure a podcast into two parts or three acts or whatever it's going to be? Um, how do you stay organized? How do you plan for episodes? You don't realize it, but I have a spreadsheet that I put everything in. Building that spreadsheet is kind of one of those things that I think I'm pretty good at. I whip up a Google sheet like it's no one's business. You know, I can really make a Google sheet. And that's the kind of thing that they've given me. I also did that for our dev teams uh switch from what we call Kanban to Agile. Kanban is where individual projects are handed from person to person, and it's sort of like as it comes in, you know, uh easy come, easy go. And it's like, all right, this is what you're working on right now, and this is what you're working on right now. Whereas Agile is split into sprints, which is to say you get your hopper full of work, and then we go into it and we have a one week or two week sprint, and they get assigned, the devs get assigned their work, and then we start, they start working on it. And I led the transition, meaning I had to fill up, you know, build out an agile an agile board, and what is the process, and set up the recurring meetings and uh set up these workflows that pop into our Slack every single week on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. There's a new workflow that pops in that says, Hey, if you have a ticket, make sure you send it in by this time and it tags people. That kind of stuff is what I think I have made my uh mark at punch mark with is thinking in the form of systems. Another person who's really good at this is our project management, um, project manager, uh Lorenzo. He's incredibly strong at this. He works on project management and projects, where he has this whole system, we call it uh traffic control, and as things come in, he it creates a JIRA and he assigns it to people and it pops into a Slack channel. And that system takes a lot of time and effort to set up, but when it works well, it makes everybody's job easier. And I always say it feels like swimming. It's like you're just kind of floating through and you're going. And I was given the premium vendor program um relatively recently, back in April, and I can confidently say it was very daunting. I uh the vendor program has been with Punchmarks since the very beginning, pretty much. And uh Ross loves to remind me we had this early version called uh the retail marketplace, I think it was, and the vendor marketplace, that it would vendors could add in data and they could add in marketing banners, and it was just very um it wasn't it wasn't mature yet, but it had some really strong nuggets, and eventually it was paired back to just a form of centralized data. So, why do we do this? And I I promise we're gonna get into the interesting part, but I gotta set this thing up. The vendor program is one of punchmarks, what we call motes, and I think in the form of business all the time, and uh these business analysts talk about motes. Like, for example, Amazon has an incredible moat when it comes to um last mile delivery, they have a fleet of delivery and delivery systems and delivery uh lockers that allows them to get those deliveries done. If someone wanted to compete against them, they would have to invest a staggering amount of money to cross or match that moat. And this is one of those things that prevents them from being, you know, siege, if you will. And one of the things that this premium vendor program does for us is um, you know, we've spent a ton of time building up this system, working with our vendors, liaising with them, which is what I'm doing right now, and centralizing the data in a standardized form so that when people ask us, hey, what does Punchmark have versus a um another website platform or a generic website platform uh that you've probably heard of? We can confidently say, Oh, we work with vendors to centralize uh millions of products. And if you carry those products, then you can quickly load them. And that's one of those things that we have is it's a nice moat and it allows us to um, you know, be a crossroad. So what are some of the struggles with it? Well, vendors, I love a man. If there's any vendors listening, we love you. But some vendors are not very data sav or uh tech savvy, so they might not have great data. And what we require is if you have, you might call it, I don't know, metal type, and then another one might be might call it product components or something like that. Well, we gotta decide what are we going to display on a website's you know on the front end, and we have to standardize and normalize the data. So, how do we filter and funnel that in? Well, it takes a lot of work. So, why what is that? You don't need to know everything about it, but why am I talking about this? Well, I got handed this program when our previous vendor liaison had stepped away, and I was working on like more business operations end of things, and uh Ross called me up one day and was like, Hey, what do you think about taking on this new program? To give you an idea, we have seven branches of our company. We have project management, design, development, marketing, customer success, and vendors. And oh, and sales. And getting a branch of a of a of a company is kind of daunting. And the thing is, is it was sort of you know going to be in flux because the previous person was stepping away. I want to make this clear. I am not a data person. I went to school for design, I don't know anything about data. But if you approach this with design thinking and you think about this, I guess as a strategist, well, suddenly you can be a little bit creative. And to give you an idea about this, like uh when a vendor provides me a spreadsheet, well, you've got to go in and hand it uh, how do you hand it to the developer to import? And how do you communicate back this information about the data having issues? Well, I think that if you think about your own business, there's probably a lot of things that you might not know how to do. For example, maybe your website or maybe uh stone setting or maybe watch battery repair or things like that. But you have to trust other people to get it done, and you have to work yourself into the system in a way that you're not going to freak out. I am a guy who's very prone to anxiety. I know that about myself, and this program taking it on was very overwhelming and very much made me super anxious and I was very stressed. But when you start thinking about it as like a complex project that someone gave you, it's better to work with what you've already got as opposed to uh whitewashing right over and like fixing it or uh starting from a clean slate and then building because if you can use what they gave you, you're a little bit farther down the road than if you start from scratch. So why are we doing this? Well, I keep in mind that vendors, the relationship between vendors and retailers is very important to the jewelry industry's ecosystems. There are there's this chain of uh product as it goes to the the shopper where the manufacturer makes it, and a lot of times the vendor is them producing something and then they're distributing it to the retailer, and then eventually the retailer sells it to the shopper and the shopper's happy. Well, how can we set up ourselves to conduct information and data in that way? Punchmark already does that with their the website, it's the natural vessel for these this product data. But to me, I always think about, for example, if a uh retailer subscribes to a vendor, uh they sign up at a jewelry show and they sign up with I'm not gonna name a name because they're not paying us at one of our premium vendors, and they sign up and it's like, hey, uh, you gotta get all this product on your website so that you can start selling it. Well, they could go in and they could take all the product and photograph it in their light box and write descriptions and write titles and and fill out materials. That takes a lot of time and a lot of work. Well, what if there's an easier way? And that's where the vendor program comes in. But what is it in reverse? Why would a vendor want to be in there other than to make their retailers, you know, a little bit happier and a little bit easier? Well, for me, I think what we could offer the re uh the vendor is to let them know what products are doing well. But we don't do that yet. We weren't offering them insights yet. And I think one of the issues was at a core principle, the the flow and the crossroads that we were setting up for this relationship. And this is just me talking out loud and trying to, you know, explain something that has been very complex and something that I feel like I've had to, I don't know, discern for myself is like we were setting up essentially like a yield sign for one direction and not the other. So one lane of traffic was always getting priority, and the other one was kind of getting no value in return or wasn't seeing value. So I decided to reach in and try to talk about and and discern what it is we could offer back to the vendor on behalf of the retailer so that they might be able to see the value and also be more excited to be a part of the program. And this is very different than what the vendor program was doing beforehand. Is uh before it was like the vendors would like give us data and we require data to be sent every 90 days because that's how you know otherwise the prices might be out of date or the product availability might be out of date. So they were sending us data, sending us data, and the retailers were you know ingesting it, they were taking it and putting it on their website, but there was no like communication, and there's no, hey, this is going well, or hey, this is not going well. It was just send us more data, send us more data. And the retailers um weren't really like saying anything about it either. They weren't really telling them, hey, this is going well. It was very much like we had to operate on just a mutual vibes agreement that, hey, this is going well for everybody. But when you're not seeing a monetary or visual value to something, it's hard to kind of prioritize it, right? You we're humans, we tend to just value what's in front of us and what we can see with our eyeballs. And sometimes it means that, like, if I was to say, take something from you for free, and then one day I'm like, hey, this is really expensive for me. Uh, can you start giving me, you know, a hundred dollars every time I do this? Well, suddenly it's like, well, we could just stop doing it because I don't see the value in it. But if you were to say then, like, oh, but it is really valuable, well, suddenly it's like, well, you haven't shown me that it's valuable, so why am I gonna give you the money? So, how can we make it valuable to the vendor? And that's the conversation that I've started to have. And it's been a lot of work. Uh one of it is asking for feedback. So, one thing that I've learned from retailers is that they are always talking with their customers and they are always figuring out what is going well. You all probably know better than anybody what is going to be successful at your at your shop. And that's what's always so funny is that a lot of times vendors are saying to retailers, this is going to be so good, like this product is going to be so successful at your short uh shop. When it to me, I'm almost like, I think you're kind of out of place. Like the retailer knows what is actually going to sell because you're the one that can look at what has sold for the last one year, five years, a hundred years, and tell them, yeah, like this is gonna be successful, this is not going to be successful. Granted, there might be some insights about the future when it comes to like upcoming trends, but even still, I feel like trends are different for different parts of the country and for different, you know, industries or uh spaces. I think it's like you know better than everybody. So, like when it comes to the value, what can we offer? And for me, I think one of the things is to let vendors know which retailers are doing really well and for them. And one of the things that I want to allow is have vendors have the insight to see, ah, this retailer gets tons of traffic online and is doing so well and is uh your products are getting tons of traffic um from them, not just in general, because that's not their business if you are doing well uh online. It's more like if your products, if their products are doing well on your site, that's the kind of information that then maybe this vendor could prioritize you a little bit more and say, like, hey, like, why are you doing so well online with our products? Like, let's let's talk about it. What are you doing right? How can we service you better? And then suddenly the relationship is more in depth and there's value to it. The other type of information I think that would be really good is providing information about what products are doing well across all websites. So some of these retailers have like, you know, 50 or 100 or 250 uh retailers that are subscribed to them. Well, those retailers get a pretty diverse in and broad range of shoppers. But if a couple of products are getting a lot of clicks and are selling pretty well off a couple of retailer sites, well, shouldn't they know? Right? I think that that's the interesting part is I feel like if um you know one of our vendors can find out that this product, their uh, you know, three-stone engagement ring gets tons of clicks and tons of wishless ads, well, something is something is good about that product, right? That's kind of an easy estimation. So to me, I think if we can just make it so that that information is available to a vendor, then suddenly that vendor is seeing some value in the relationship with us and to the retailer. And when we position ourselves there, like a crossroads, well, suddenly you can direct traffic. You know, you get to say, like, hey, this is going well, or this is not going well, or hey, can you give us a little bit of money to cover our costs? And that whole data is the new gold um idea, that's from the 2010s. But I think it's still true. It's just you gotta stick and move about what products are doing, uh, about uh how you leverage that data. And I think it's fascinating because we're working with some of the biggest vendors in the world. Uh, you know, Stular and uh Ajaffee and Quality Gold and uh Viragio and Royal Chain and Rembrandt Charms, all these, all these folks, man. And I I love their jewelry, but some of them uh it's almost like they haven't been asked uh or they haven't put the time in yet to work on their data, and some of them have. And it's so fascinating, like the discrepancy where like some people have incredible data and some people have not good data. So to me, it's about normalizing and standardizing this uh data in relationship as best as I can and taking it from like an operations and systems standpoint, and that's what I'm trying to do. I've been leading the overhaul of this department since April, and we're starting to see some changes. Uh it's so funny, it works so it's so slow getting this stuff done because every single step, it's like you can't just say, hey, vendors should start paying money. To me, it's like, okay, why why are they gonna pay the money? You know, you can't just say, hey, give us money, because they'll just say no, and then they'll leave, you know? It's like, okay, what can we offer them to make them pay us money? Well, we can outline a couple features and you gotta ask them, hey, what features would you most want? And then they tell you, but they don't tell you, hey, we want a way to upload marketing images for all of our uh all of our clients. We want, they they say, we wanna we do marketing campaigns. Can you make it so that like every retailer can access them? Okay, how do we make that work? And then suddenly it's like you gotta go so many steps back and work on it together. And it's been fun, it's been stressful, but it's been fun. And I gotta give a lot of shout-outs to Ross and Brian at Punchmark because you know they're my my partners in this thing. And getting things started is the scary part. But once we get things uh, you know, flying, you know, let's say we get vendors to, you know, be more invested and we build this system that makes it so that vendors are really leaning in. Well then, and retailers hopefully are more happy because they have more products and better products on their website, and maybe they're making more sales and things look better and they have more robust uh data points for their products. Well, everything nothing just flops out of the sky. Everything requires a little bit of extra, you know, effort and information and you know process. And I think that that's one of those things that I've been successful in in the past. And if, you know, the past is anything to look at, then I'll hopefully be successful in this, you know, upcoming era. How will this impact you? Well, I'm hoping to get this thing done by the end of the year. I'm hoping that in the end of the year we'll get a lot of the vendor overhaul done. And then starting next year, I'll be able to go to a bunch of jewelry shows and talk to vendors and get them to really buy in on the process. And then who knows where we go from there? You know, once they're really in and we can have retailers and vendors like, you know what I mean, like talking to each other, we don't have to play the game of telephone. We don't have to be in the middle, hey, the retailer said your data is bad, you know, your products are out of date. And then the vendor says, okay, here's the new data. And then we say to the retailer, uh, hey, the data is up to date. Instead, if we were to have it so that retailers could say, Hey, how come your new line of uh of jewelry isn't in the premium vendor program? They'd be like, Oh, let's add that. They add it, and then the retailer understands that. If that's the case, then suddenly everyone's happier and more human together. Okay, that was a long, complex thought that I've been thinking about for the last pretty long while. And I've been trying my best to uh keep it under wraps because it's just not done yet. And I sometimes worry about sharing things that are not yet done. But this one, to me, it's talking about it from like a a data and infrastructure perspective that makes it kind of interesting. I've talked about it with my friends that are not at Punchmark, where I'm like explaining how we have to offer value and get people to buy in, and then we can make, you know, more strategic steps from there. And pretty much everybody thinks it's very interesting that it's you know this complex thought and we're flipping something on its head that's never been done before. And I figured I would share it because that's what in the loop's about. It's about sharing, you know, interesting stories and topics that we're working on that hopefully impact jewelry stores and the jewelry industry um on a on a large basis. So that's what I'm working on. Overhauling the vendor program. If you have any questions or any feedback about the vendor program, do reach out. Michael at punchmark.com. I'd love to talk with you and hear your thoughts. Definitely open it up. Alright, everybody, that's the end of the show. Thanks so much for listening. This week was a solo episode, and this episode was brought to you by Punchmark. This episode was hosted by me, Michael Burpo, and edited by Paul Suarez with music by Ross Cochran. Don't forget to rate the podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and leave us feedback on punchmark.com slash loop. That's L-O-U-P-E. Thanks, we'll be back next week, Tuesday, with another episode. Cheers. Bye.
