Episode 361: Q1 Rundown in 7 Minutes (Platform Updates, Events, and AI)

Hi friends, it's Bobby. Q1 is almost in the books. I cannot believe Q2 is already here. About once a quarter on the SkuCast, I skip the guest interview and I drop in for just a few minutes to catch you up on all that we've been building at Common Skew, plus a few event announcements I'm excited to tell you about. I'll start with the platform. ShipStation is now live inside Common Skew. So if you've been exporting orders manually or rekeying things into ShipStation, That's done. Orders move straight through now. No CSVs, no uploads. If fulfillment has been a friction point for you, this solves it. Shopify connected shops also graduated from beta. So if you're selling through Shopify, those orders can now come straight into CommonSKU. If clients have been asking you for a Shopify storefront and you've hesitated, now you can say yes. We also have a new partnership with Office Beacon. They provide trained, professionally managed remote staff for promo distributors. People who can step right into order management on Commscue because they're trained on Commscue, sales support, invoicing, customer service. So if you're feeling that operational squeeze, they're definitely worth a look. All right, events. Let's talk events because we have two major announcements. First is CSU Live. Commscue University Live is back. It's Thursday, April 16th, 1 to 3 p.m. Eastern. It's virtual. It's free for all Commscue distributor customers. Aaron Couturier and the customer success team are running it, and it's a full afternoon of hands-on platform education, automation, production workflows, reporting, the buyer experience, hacks, best tips, all of it. Now, here's the thing I keep telling leaders. When your whole team shows up together, sales, ops, leadership, all in the same room learning the same stuff about the platform, that's when things actually click. April 16th, bring your whole team. Now, you might have heard also about SCU Camp this fall. Since we launched SCU Camp in 2017, we've been to Palm Springs, Austin, New Orleans, Nashville, Brooklyn, Scottsdale. Everywhere we've gone, people always ask the same question: when is SCU Camp going international? This year it does. SCU Camp goes international for the first time. We're meeting September 27th through the 30th at Hotel William Gray in Montreal. It's 3 days with branded merch pros, people who've really figured it out, straight talk from operators, plus big ideas from outside experts. And the 2 keynotes this year. First, Todd Henry. He has spent nearly 20 years helping leaders and creative pros figure out how to do their best work when the pressure is real. Todd's leading a workshop. Now he's written 7 books. You might have heard of The Accidental Creative, and his podcast Daily Creative has been downloaded more than 20 million times. Now, Todd's spoken before at one of our events, SKUCon. So why are we having him back? At SKUCon, he talked about how to be your best creative self. At SKU Camp, which is an event for leaders, he's talking about how you can lead creative professionals. We are entering a new era where the industry is going to be far more creative than ever before, and you are going to need to know how to lead those teams. So join us for SKU Camp to hear Todd Henry and also Anna Angelic. I've been wanting Anna Angelic at SKU Camp for a few years. She wrote a book called Hitmakers: How Brands Influence Culture. She has been recognized before as a Forbes Top 50 CMO, and she's one of the few CMOs I know who talk about building merch as a pillar of a brand strategy. Registration details can be found at skucamp.com. I encourage you to buy those tickets now because SKU Camp does sell out. Now, a few internal updates. Community is incredibly important to us, and in early March, a group from Kominsky traveled to Honduras with distributors to visit SanMar's manufacturing partner, Elkatex, to stand inside the place where a t-shirt actually gets made. It was such an inspiring trip and journey. Many of the folks that went on this trip with SanMar have been selling t-shirts for years, for 20 years. So they watched the whole sequence from raw cotton and recycled plastic chips that became yarn, becoming fabric, fabric getting dyed, cut, sewn, and the factory was only part of it. SanMar and Elkotex have made major investments in the community where these garments are made, including investments in schools and orphanages. And our team got to sit on the floor doing crafts with kids, playing soccer, sharing meals along with distributors. It was an amazing experience. You can read all about it on our blog on an article called What Honduras Taught Us About a T-Shirt. We'll add that link in the show notes. All right, finally, let's talk about the hottest topic this year, AI. AI product search is available for all common SKU users. Now, what I like about this, it just doesn't start with a blank search bar. It starts with what your client has actually bought before, layers in the project details, and surfaces products that make sense for that specific relationship. And it gets smarter with every order your team places. We also have the Skubot AI mockup generator in beta. When we polled PromoPros, creating mockups was the number one thing people wanted AI to do. Now, what makes this one different from generating an image somewhere else is that it's built into your workflow. As that is our passion, to make everything easier for you. It knows how the product is configured, decoration method, location, client art, and renders it accordingly. You can build a full presentation with realistic branded mockups without leaving Commsku. So coming in Q2, we have the Skubot Opportunity Bot. 85% of distributor business comes from existing clients. but nobody has time to mine years of data looking for gaps. The Opportunity Bot does that for you. I've seen it. It's amazing. It looks at your clients, your orders, your contacts and services, the revenue patterns you're not seeing in your own data. Stay tuned for more info on that one. And just a little note about AI inside Commonsku. Now, as we're very passionate about AI inside and outside for our clients as well as for our team, because how we've been approaching it inside Commonsku This might be useful for you and how you think about it inside your own company. Last November, we brought on Eku Malcolm as Director of AI Operations, and since then, he's run a company-wide AI readiness survey. He's launched weekly AI office hours program, and he's rolled out tooling across the company. Gemini for everyone, Claude for ops and finance, Cursor for engineering. The frame he uses, and one I've come to appreciate, last year was all about experimentation with AI. This year, it's all about execution. Okay, to close, if there are two things I want you to walk away from, it's this. Number one, sign up for SKU Camp. You will be inspired and you will be inspired to lead better teams. Check that out at skucamp.com. Number two, sign up your team for CSU Live. Remember, it's Thursday, April 16th, 1 to 3 PM Eastern. You can register in-app or you can go to commonsku.com/csulive to get your whole team in there. That's it for this quarter. We'll be back with more updates, more integrations, and more AI news at the end of Q2. Stay tuned for our next episode, which will feature Stephanie Friedman from City Paper Company. You're not going to believe her story from bankruptcy to millions in sales. Thanks for listening. I'm Bobby Lehew. This show is produced by me and my colleague Ritz. We'll chat with you next episode.