An AI Innovation & Collaboration: commonsku's June 2025 HQ Gathering!

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Last week, the commonsku team turned Toronto's Novotel Centre into a hub of AI innovation, with 70 team members coming together for our June HQ gathering. Our mission? To supercharge our position as the promo industry's leading connected workflow platform and community!

Our HQ opportunities are always an incredible chance for cross-functional collaboration between departments to catalyze growth. Want to know what went on behind the scenes? Here’s a glimpse!

Two Days of Vision & Action

Being a “for promo, by promo” company, as teammates arrived, Sarah Remple, our Senior Community Manager, delivered (as always) on the merch, creating a "sticker activation" to personalize laptops (made by community supplier StickerYou)  using merch to reinforce our culture and values.

Day one kicked off with welcome remarks from CEO Catherine Graham and President and Chief Brand Officer Mark Graham, plus an introduction to new team members and HQ first-timers led by Martha Carscadden, Director of People. 

Catherine then led a YTD outlook and look ahead session, reinforcing our core purpose: to create the promotional products industry of the future by being the leading connected workflow software platform and community. The team celebrated massive wins, from: 

• Explosive growth in company client count 
• Revenue achievements that eclipsed our 2024 numbers 
• Our successful event experiences including Skucon, Expo, and the CEO Summit 
• And crushing Shops growth with a 147% increase!

Looking ahead, we talked about key initiatives including the launch of Enterprise, our Fall skucamp in Scottsdale, team growth, and AI transformation.

A significant portion of our time was dedicated to our Strategic Initiative (“SIs” as we call them) Updates. We dove into multiple core SIs, including our enterprise initiative, protecting our core (which means continual development for our core clients), and shops development with upcoming Shopify connections and more!

Martha then presented our own employee engagement survey results. This twice-annual survey is crucial for gathering data-driven feedback to set our People strategy, uncover any issues, and identify opportunities, providing insights to leadership on what's working and what isn't for our team. With an impressive 100% participation rate, the survey covered demographics, leadership and management effectiveness, alignment, core engagement, and open-ended questions, with alternating sections on enablement and resources for growth and career development. Positive feedback from the team highlighted clear vision and strategic alignment, supportive management, AI adoption, and a general feeling of optimism (but always looking to improve).

The first day wrapped up with a Roadmap discussion with our VP of Product, Charlie Moscoe with our lead Product Managers: Anastasiia Shydenko, Abby Oni, and Nathan Poch followed by departmental brainstorms.

To cap off the day, we enjoyed a delightful neighborhood walk through Berczy Park and St. Lawrence Market, culminating in a fun cooking class at The St. Lawrence Market (gnocchi for everyone!)

Day two began with more Strategic Initiative Updates focusing on ePOs, our forthcoming data warehouse, and more. Bobby Lehew led an interview with Mark and Catherine during an "ask us anything" session, answering any question from the team, covering everything from our company’s fast-growth to industry updates and tariffs impact.

But the highlight of our two-day gathering? A dedicated AI Workshop.

The AI Workshop & Hackathon

One of the most anticipated sessions was our AI workshop and hackathon. Led by our new VP of Technology, Dileshni Jayasinghe –who has extensive experience with AI and is a leader in the Toronto tech community– our goal was to get hands-on with AI, learn by doing, and experiment with ways to make our work easier, faster, or more fun. It was designed for everyone, regardless of technical background, with a focus on playful experimentation and tackling real workflow challenges. Workshops like these are crucial for an AI-first company like ours. Teams were formed to address specific challenges. Here’s just a glimpse of some of our fun team names and a peek into what they were trying to solve!

• Sku-ms: Focused on automating time-consuming prospecting tasks and using AI for data enrichment, with potential algorithms for more accurate lead scoring.
• Heard Mentality: Tackled the challenge of siloed customer feedback by exploring ways to better capture, organize, and activate real customer feedback from various sources to inform roadmap decisions and marketing messaging.
• Autonomous OnboardOps: Worked toward developing an AI-powered autonomous onboarding assistant to streamline the developer setup process through containerized setup and a codebase-aware AI assistant.
• skugest: Wanted to create a Netflix-style recommendation system for commonsku features and content, analyzing user behavior to drive personalized engagement.
• cookieGPT & the skuties of fortune: Designed a creative "fortune cookie / magic 8 ball / 20 questions" mashup for answering commonsku questions with a good dose of commonsku wit and humor.
• commonSenseSKU: Proposed an AI API solution to normalize SKU formats from multiple suppliers, reducing errors and accelerating order processing.
• Schedule Me!: Worked on an AI scheduling assistant to optimize team members' time management and work allocation.

Day two ended with departmental team gatherings for some informal hang time (it was rainy, so a lot of us took to the amazing Toronto coffee shops) which was crucial for team bonding and it provided a chance for many of our newcomers to get to know their peers IRL.

And a commonsku event wouldn’t be complete without some type of competitive game so we took to the bowling alley for some fierce rolls (no surprise: Aaron Kucherawy crushed everyone).

Always Cooking!

Our “June HQ” was more than just a series of meetings; it was a testament to the collective energy, talent, and commitment of our entire team. The insights gained from our strategic initiative updates, the honest feedback from our engagement survey, and the innovative spirit of the AI workshop continue to help drive our outlook and stick to one of our values, always staying “ten steps ahead.” 

The thing about commonsku: We are always trying to find ways to boost our collective efforts to streamline workflows, delight clients, and accelerate growth for our customers. Or maybe better said: Always cooking!

Ps. Big thanks to the HQ committee and especially Sam Bridges (our People and Culture Pro!) who steered the ship, inspired with ideas, and gave all-around feedback to make sure the entire team was heard, felt, and represented – plus, you’re so damn fun to work with, mad props to each of you and thank you (to the entire team) for being there for your mates, opening your minds, and making this such an exceptional experience for all!