Signature Champions: From Spreadsheet Chaos to Automated Revenue

The situation before we showed up

Signature Champions manufactures custom championship rings for sports teams across the US. When we met them they were running a $5M business on spreadsheets.

What was breaking

• Order planning lived in several spreadsheets.
  Answering "what is the status of this order" meant opening a file and reading it.
• Customization was tracked per person, manually.
  Every ring in a fifty-player order can carry different engraving, sizing and materials.
• Payments were collected one at a time.
  Some teams paid as a group, some individually, some wanted part upfront and the balance on delivery.
• Nobody shared a system.
  Coaches, sales reps, manufacturing plants and the office each worked from their own view, reconciled by email.
• Customer service lived in email threads.
  Which meant the history of an order lived in whichever inbox happened to hold it.

The real problem: four different users, one order

This was never a storefront project. A single order passes through four groups of people who need completely different things from the same data.

• Team coaches
  Collecting orders from twenty to a hundred players, chasing the ones who have not responded.
• Individual customers
  Buying one ring, wanting to see what it will look like before paying.
• Outside sales reps
  Running several team accounts at once and tracking their own commission.
• Manufacturing plants
  Needing production-ready data, not a spreadsheet export someone reformatted.

On top of that sit add-on orders after delivery, repairs, returns, and communication running in every direction between all four groups.

What we actually built

A custom portal that acts as the single system of record, with the communication and order processing automated around it.

One portal, four views

• Coaches
  A dashboard showing the whole team order, customizable ordering links to send to players, a live view of who has ordered and who has paid, and automated reminders so the chasing stops being a person's job.
• Customers
  A ring builder with real-time preview, personalization for engraving, sizing and materials, payment plans with automated billing, and order tracking.
• Sales reps
  Multi-team management, commission tracking, order status across every account, and support tools in the same place.
• Plants
  Production-ready exports, automated artwork approval, quality control tracking and repair request management.
• Signature admins
  One record for every order, customer and item, synced to Google Data Studio for reporting.

Communication, automated

More than 80 manual email scenarios were replaced. Transactional messaging moved to SendGrid with a template for every order stage, automated status updates, reminders on incomplete orders, and delivery logs showing what was sent, opened and clicked. Twilio handles SMS.

We also built a custom interactive voice response system that routes inbound calls to the right department, captures voicemail outside operating hours, and writes call history back to the order. An in-portal chat covers coach to rep messaging and customer support, with the message history attached to the order rather than to a person.

Order processing

• Order planning
  Team rosters, sizes and customizations organized automatically instead of collated by hand.
• Payment collection
  Payment plans, reminders and reconciliation run on their own, including the split between team-pay and individual-pay orders.
• Delivery
  Shipping notifications, tracking and confirmations.
• Returns and repairs
  Request forms, approval workflow and status tracking, so a repair is a record rather than an email.

Built to run, not to demo

• Infrastructure
  A custom Laravel portal for Signature's own workflows, with Magento handling the individual storefront, a relational model built for the order relationships, and responsive design throughout.
• Integrations
  Payment processing, QuickBooks for finance, HubSpot for marketing and artwork, ShipStation for fulfilment, SendGrid for email and Twilio for SMS and voice.
• Quality
  Automated testing on every release, a dev to staging to production pipeline, comprehensive logging and monitoring, and an average bug fix time under an hour.

The numbers

Reported by Signature Champions after the system went live.

What changed operationally

User adoption reached 100% within two months, which for a system used by coaches and volunteers rather than staff is the number we watch most closely.

The bottom line

Signature Champions can now take on more orders without adding people to handle them. Around 300 hours a month came back, more than $100K a year in operating cost went away, and the customer experience improved because the information a customer asks for is now somewhere a person can actually look it up.