commonsku Turns 10!

10 years ago, commonsku was just Catherine, me, and one developer subletting space from our other business at the time, Rightsleeve.

It was a thrilling - and truthfully, a highly uncertain - time as we juggled running one established business with complicated needs plus a highly needy startup.

commonsku was hatched from the in-house software platform we built for Rightsleeve. We were really passionate about how to grow and scale a promotional products business, so we wanted to apply that passion to help an entire industry, using the power of technology.

When I started in the promotional products industry in the late 90s, running the business entailed paper-based purchase orders, fax machines, thick paper catalogs, and a lot of hustle. 

From 2000-2005, things improved slightly with software like Quickbooks, industry product search databases, and Microsoft Office, but data re-entry across multiple systems became the new nightmare and limited our growth.

In 2005, frustrated with a lack of options that stitched everything together, we decided to develop our own in-house solution that was tailor-made to the complex promotional products workflow. As promotional colleagues know well, this industry is surprisingly complicated with an average distributor juggling multiple clients, suppliers, products, and colleagues on any given day. Things get out of control quickly, and we had a front-row seat to the drama as Rightsleeve was growing. 

Something had to be done. ROMAN was our answer to those problems (Rightsleeve Order Management).

2005-2010 was an exciting time as ROMAN was developed, honed, and tweaked, setting Rightsleeve up for a period of growth and efficiency. Our good friend, Graham White, deserves a ton of credit as our original developer of ROMAN. Patient to a fault, Graham helped us navigate these exciting, and occasionally very frustrating, times. This was also the era when Catherine stepped into Rightsleeve. With her incredible business mind, Catherine was able to help us navigate some of our biggest challenges.

In 2009-2010, we spoke to several industry colleagues who were experiencing the same growth and efficiency problems we faced in 2000-2005. It became clear that many others were struggling with technology and valued the experience we had been through. 

We loved thinking about all the ways that technology could help our business. That thinking began to shift towards how technology could help our industry. 

This is when we decided to launch a software company and rebuild our in-house solution as a multi-tenanted, enterprise-class software product that could accommodate Rightsleeve and many, many others.

In 2010, we engaged a design firm (shout out to our friends Satish Kanwar and Arati Sharma at Jet Cooper) who helped us reimagine the user interface of our nascent software product. Arati and Satish remain a tremendous source of inspiration for us in the roles they have played in the stunning success of Shopify, and recently for Arati with the launch of Backbone Angels.

In 2011, we launched commonsku officially and started testing with a select few distributors. A big thanks to our colleagues at Rightsleeve for their tremendous patience as they ran through multiple issues, as well as McLoughlin Promotions (Toronto) and Brand Fuel (Raleigh and Virginia) for entering the fray with us as our beta distributors. We are so thankful for their friendship and are incredibly proud and honored to call each of them customers and friends to this day. 

In many ways, 2010-2011 felt like that section of the roller coaster where you’re climbing up the tracks - clickety clack, clickety clack - on the way to something terrifying and thrilling.

In 2011, we tipped over the top of the roller coaster and leaned into all of the elements of growing a software company: finding those early customers, recruiting early employees, arranging financing, building a sales process, designing the brand, honing the software product, supporting customers, launching customer events, fighting bugs, and managing feature requests. 

It hit us like a tsunami and it was every bit as thrilling and terrifying as we had anticipated.

What’s amazing about today and those early days is that these elements remain the same. It’s just on a much bigger scale.

While it’s fun to look back at how the company was started and some of the trials of those early days, we are most proud of the people who have helped build commonsku, our colleagues, and our customers.

Here’s what our colleagues and customers have helped commonsku accomplish over the past 10 years …

$1.1 BN in annual gross merchandise volume

600+ distributor companies in 6 countries 

100 supplier partners

11 integrations

196 skucast episodes, 487 blog posts

2,700,000 Purchase Orders processed through commonsku 

27 colleagues in 9 cities

One custom-built office space in Toronto

33 events hosted (since 2015 when we launched our first event, skucon)

132,390 posts on the commonsku community

In many ways, though we are crossing the ten-year mark, we feel much of the same energy we did when we first began. And in some ways, we feel it even more: More optimism about our industry's future, more strength from our distributor and supplier customers, more excitement around an amazing team we love working with, and more hope in ever-improving ways to work in the future.

Thank you, skummunity!

Mark Graham and Catherine Graham

Co-founders, commonsku

ps. To listen to the lessons learned over the past ten years, tune into the related skucast episode here.