Caspio Solves IT Skills Gap for Resource-Crunched Firms

Case Study Synopsis

Customer	Hammacher Schlemmer
Industry	Consumer Services / Retail
Challenge	Consolidate multiple data sources into one platform, without relying on IT
Why Caspio	Allows users to manage disparate data from multiple sources in one platform Empowers business managers to create solutions despite limited resources Constantly adds new features and updates to the development platform

Transcript

My name is Henry Coleman. I’m the vice president of marketing at Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oldest catalog. Hammacher has been around since 1848 and started as a hardware store, and then after time, launched a catalog. We ended up being the oldest catalog in America.

Here at the world headquarters of Hammacher Schlemmer, we have two different things that are quite unique. One, it’s virtually a museum. We’re approaching our 170th anniversary next year. But we also work in a jungle. We have running streams, we have growing trees, we have incredibly fast-growing bamboo—such a really dynamic workplace.

So, what’s interesting is to connect some of these crazy products we sell to an environment, it’s quite engaging.

Finding Modern Ways to Connect to Customers

My role as Vice President of Marketing is to oversee all ways in which we connect to customers, whether it’s from the catalog or website, driving people to our New York store or social media. How we connect to them and how we introduce our products, that’s my role.

Challenges that I faced before finding the Caspio platform? Too many to mention! It really has to go with how you run a business in terms of having an IT department, having a business department, having an analytics department.

Everybody’s competing for resources, and I needed resources. I needed answers.

Linking Multiple Sources Into One Platform

I needed a way to put information together in a way that I could share it with other people.

One of the things that I really like about Caspio is they’ve had an aggressive roadmap. With a single product, with a single platform, it gets better and better each year. And we’ve been able to do that, so we’ve been a client for 10 years. We started out with very simple activity.

There have been several situations where I’ve recommended Caspio to peers.

I’ve been at conferences, internet retailer, or shop.org and I have people telling me some of their challenges with data silos and they just wish they could put this together with this. Their IT department is telling them, “It’s going to take weeks or months.” And I was able to demonstrate to them that it’s straightforward, it’s cost-effective.

Solving Problems Over the Weekend… Without Coding!

You can really do some impressive things with the tool that isn’t that hard to use. I’m not a hard-core coder. I don’t do that. I’ve never had that experience.

What Caspio has allowed me to do is have fun on weekends, sometimes to put together things. And then on Monday morning, my team would come in, it solves a problem that we’ve all had like, “When did you do this?” I’m like, “Well, I actually did it over the weekend.”