Powers Manufacturing Upgrades Dealer Shopping Cart Experience

Powers Manufacturing, which makes custom uniforms for sports teams, launched its custom uniform builder in 2015. Customers use the builder to design their uniforms—both tops and bottoms—and build out rosters to order the quantity, sizes, and jersey numbers they need. 

The uniform builder helps customers visualize and customize their uniforms without tedious back-and-forth with the Powers team, benefiting everyone involved. The process used to be entirely manual, but Powers decided to move more functionality into the uniform builder to reduce manual internal processes. 

“The builder is a key element of our business,” said Brian Smith, who does sales at Powers. “We use it on the customer-facing side and we also use it to process orders internally. Customers like it and they rely on it now—they wouldn’t know any other way.”

Multi-uniform Purchasing

In the latest round of updates done by the Far Reach team, the focus was on Powers’ dealer customers. We made the shopping cart easier to use when multiple garments are ordered together, rather than limiting orders to just one uniform at a time. This means, for example, that dealers can order both home and away jerseys at the same time instead of submitting separate orders.

“Usually when dealers order uniforms, they’re ordering multiple,” said Smith. “Now the dealers have one cart, one checkout process, one purchase order.”

“The multi-uniform cart has been live for a few months,” Smith said. “And we’ve had some good feedback on it from our dealers.”

In addition to this process being easier for dealers, it’s also more streamlined for the Powers team. “We wanted all of our workflows to be captured through the builder,” said Scott Klieman, who also does sales at Powers. “These updates simplified our own internal processes and removed some manual steps behind the scenes.”

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User Experience

Powers has been especially focused this year on usability—they want the uniform builder to be easy enough that users can walk through the whole process without assistance from the Powers team. Some of the updates to meet this goal include:

• Refining the workflow for adding rosters and other information
• Adding descriptive labels throughout the system
• Improving the user interface (UI) within the shopping cart

Klieman said, “The user experience of the system is important to us because we want to make it simple for dealers to order from us. We wanted to mirror what they’re used to in other online shopping experiences so the process is familiar and easy.”

The updates have a larger business purpose as well, according to Smith and Klieman. “Since dealers can order on their own, and our internal processes are streamlined, we can grow our business because we can process orders more quickly,” said Smith.

Backend Updates

We’ve also made behind-the-scenes updates to improve usability and facilitate a transition to cloud storage, including:

• Performance improvements
• Moving images to Azure Blob Storage
• Making the system easier to maintain

The custom uniform builder is a central piece of Powers Manufacturing’s business. The more work that’s completed in the builder, the fewer manual processes remain for the team to have to do. Making the system easy to use and able to handle most common order scenarios frees up the Powers team to help customers with complex orders, issues, and edge cases. 

Happy With the Enhancements

Early feedback on the updates indicate that the new shopping cart is user-friendly and that customers, especially dealers, can easily complete the entire ordering process online. The Powers team appreciates the streamlined internal processes as well as the backend updates that aren’t as visible. And they like working with Far Reach.

“The many years working on the builder have been great,” Klieman said. “We love it. It’s gone really well. The Far Reach team’s accessibility is incredible—they’re responsive and great to work with.”

Smith said, “There has been a lot of great back and forth, especially on this round of updates. The Far Reach team takes our ideas and turns them into reality.”