Episode 368: A Mid-Year Update on All Things commonsku

[00:00:00] [Intro music]
[00:00:06] Bobby: Hey, friends. It's Bobby. We're at the halfway mark of 2026, and I wanna use the next 15 minutes to catch you up on all things commonsku, the happenings within the commonsku community, platform releases, and events and experiences both from this past quarter and a glimpse at what's to come. Joining me in just a few minutes to talk about the platform is commonsku's very own Bella Chamoun-Ko.

[00:00:27] Bobby: But for the moment, let's start with a quick community update. The 2026 PPAI Top 100 list released a few weeks ago, and more than 20 companies that made the list run on commonsku: Akran Marketing, Boost Engagement, Magellan Promotions, City Paper Company, Score Promotions, Image Source, Whitestone, Genumark, Thumbprint, John Michael Associates, LeaderPromos, Imprint Engine, Brand Fuel, Zagwear, MadeToOrder, Blue Sky Marketing Group, Doug Fregolle Promotions, The Icebox, and Signet.

[00:01:00] Bobby: If you missed our last episode, Mark Graham, commonsku's president and co-founder, sat down with three of these distributor leaders — Sandy Gonzalez, Michael Wolaver, and Robert Fiveash — for a conversation that's part celebration and part masterclass about how they made the Top 100 and their advice to you.

[00:01:15] Bobby: So go give it a listen. It's definitely worth your time. Now, you may not know it, but this year is our 15-year anniversary, and we're celebrating with something we're calling 15 Years Ahead. Now, you know us. We don't like to think in the past. We like to think ahead. More exciting news on that to come, but for now, over the next few months, we'll release a series of gifts to the industry.

[00:01:37] Bobby: So watch your inbox and socials. The first of those gifts is already live. It's called the Archive Merch Drop. It's a commonsku shop that brings back fan-favorite commonsku merch from over the years for a limited run, and it kicks off the whole 15 Years Ahead celebration. Now, we produced this with PromoKitchen, the industry nonprofit mentoring program, and every piece was donated in kind by our supplier partners:

[00:02:00] Bobby: SanMar, T-Shirt Tycoon, Numo, Gemline, and PCNA.

[00:02:05] Bobby: All the proceeds go to the Tee Hamilton Creators Award. Now, that award is named for Tee Hamilton, a designer very special to us who lost her battle with cancer and won the hearts of many with her joy-filled designs, including our mascot, skubot, that she created. Proceeds from the Archive Merch Drop, in collaboration with PromoKitchen, fund the next generation of creators in the industry.

[00:02:27] Bobby: The shop runs on pre-order, so it's only open July sixth through the thirteenth. Support the industry's future by hitting the link in the show notes. Now on to events. This past quarter, we held our CEO Summit with 17 distributor CEOs in one room for a day on growth, margin, hiring, operations, and of course, the thread running through all of it: AI.

[00:02:49] Bobby: Now, one critical number set the tone. The room averaged 42% revenue growth last year. We spent time talking about what makes AI stick on a team, and there's a full write-up on the blog with the four patterns that came out of it. We also took commonsku to Toronto Tech Week. Toronto Tech Week is the city's sprawling week-long tech festival with independently run talks, workshops, and mixers.

[00:03:11] Bobby: It's an event that brings thousands from the tech community together. We jumped in to co-host our own night with Rootly AI, where Catherine Graham, commonsku's CEO, moderated a panel of engineering leaders, including our own vice president of technology, Dileshni Jayasinghe. Now, looking ahead, skucamp is in Montreal this year, September 27th through the 30th at Hotel William Gray in Old Montreal.

[00:03:33] Bobby: Our two keynotes that will kick off each day are Ana Andjelic and Todd Henry. Now, Ana is a global brand executive and author of Hitmakers and the book The Business of Aspiration. Forbes recognized her CMO work three times, and she writes a newsletter called The Sociology of Business. Now, Todd has written seven books, including The Accidental Creative and Herding Tigers, and he hosts the Daily Creative podcast, which has passed 20 million downloads.

[00:03:58] Bobby: He speaks all over the world on creativity and doing your best work, and in the 10 years that we hosted skucon, he was one of our all-time fave speakers. Now, at skucon, he taught you how to be more creative as an individual, and at skucamp, since skucamp is an event built for leaders, he will inspire and teach us how to lead creative teams.

[00:04:17] Bobby: And as you know, if you've attended any of our events, you'll also hear from industry pros like you, straight from the trenches, such as Alan from Spector & Co., Savannah from Team SCG, Stephanie from MadeToOrder, Caleb from Imprint Engine, Lynn and Lindsay from Clementine Promotions, Tony from Vanguard, Charlie and Ashlyn from SE Logowear, and Renya from Brand Aid.

[00:04:37] Bobby: So we're 90% sold out. If you've been thinking about it, now's the time to grab those last tickets. Now, on the platform learning side, watch for commonsku University Live, affectionately known as CSU Live. It's a free half-day virtual masterclass for distributor teams on commonsku. It's hands-on training, time-saving hacks, and tactics to tighten your workflow.

[00:04:58] Bobby: The best part is it's built for your whole team. Our next one is September 10th. More details to come. Now, on the team side, early June, we brought the whole company together in Toronto for our in-person HQ, and the centerpiece this year was a company-wide hackathon. Everyone worked inside the platform that you use every day — on shops, presentations, estimates, orders.

[00:05:17] Bobby: And there were a few standouts: a single prompt that builds a full client deck, internal tooling that gets new features to you faster, and an early version of the commonsku product recommender. We also handed out our skudos awards, our peer-nominated awards. Sarah was awarded Community First, Serena earned Delightful Work, Marie earned Ten Steps Ahead, and Bella earned our Fast Forward award.

[00:05:38] Bobby: In fact, Bella's joining me now for a quick platform update. Bella is Vancouver-based and Texas-educated. She got her degree in marketing and management information systems at UT in Austin. And outside of work, she's a classical guitarist of 15 years. Here's my chat with Bella. Bella, welcome to the skucast, and congrats on that Fast Forward award.

[00:05:57] Bella: Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, the reward was incredibly surprising, as it would be with the reward, and there were tears, there was laughter, a lot of different things said. But I was incredibly delighted to even receive it in the first place, along with great thanks to my coworkers who also received their rewards as well. Congratulations to them.

[00:06:14] Bobby: Yeah, and it's peer-nominated, so they obviously think highly of you. Speaking of peers and your marketing department, tell us briefly about your role and how you work with our team and with our customers.

[00:06:24] Bella: Yeah, of course. So I'm a product marketing specialist, but my partner in crime is Allison Anderson, who is the product marketing manager.

[00:06:31] Bobby: Love Aly.

[00:06:32] Bella: Us together — Aly is her nickname — we both manage the go-to-market campaigns, with me specifically managing everything that comes down to our releases as well as our integrations and our Connected Plus partnerships. In product marketing, it's not only serving as a cross-functional partner, but it's being able to take something very complex, which even sometimes to this day I miss, but making it as digestible as possible to tailor to different types of audiences so it really resonates and lands with them.

[00:07:01] Bobby: So as promised in the intro, let's talk about what shipped in Q2, and then we'll jump into the Q3. But tell us about what shipped in Q2.

[00:07:07] Bella: Yeah, lots of exciting features shipped in Q2, starting with our AI suite. But before I get into the AI suite, I kind of just wanna take a pause, because in the world that we live in, AI is such a loaded term, for good and for worse, and there's a lot going on.

[00:07:22] Bella: There's just a lot going on. So commonsku's approach whenever we are releasing, say, an AI tool, is to be as transparent as possible with our customers, and to most importantly use their feedback and have a human-first approach to AI. So what this looks like is we're not removing the things that you love and you take pride in that require your judgment.

[00:07:41] Bella: We're trying to help you with the things that, on a Sunday morning or Monday — whatever weird, odd time you're working with orders — you don't want your coffee to go cold. You don't wanna have that backlog of things that you need to do that are keeping you from the things you take pride in. So that's the through line we're really trying to lead by. But segueing from that into this, I would say that the most exciting releases that I'm anticipating, that we've actually already released, is our AI suite featuring the AI mockup generator and the rewrite description tool. So just talking about both of them, it's really about shortening the amount of time it takes for you to present that presentation you've been spending so many hours on and deliver it into your client's hands.

[00:08:20] Bella: So what does that look like? With the AI mockup generator, customers are now able to select not one product — multiple products. They're able to go into the system, click AI Configure, and be able to add the logo that they wanna feature, ideally your client's logo. They will also be able to just click AI Configure, and then the system will be able to determine, using its best judgment, the placement and the size of the logo on a piece of merch.

[00:08:46] Bella: So just think about how much time that saves, which is crazy. And then we also have the description rewriter tool, and this is one of my personal favorites, just because it's one of those things that goes unnoticed, especially when you're delivering a presentation to a client. So product copy — it's very spec-heavy.

[00:09:07] Bella: So spec jargon is something that we as distributors, we totally get, we understand. The more information, the better. But for a client, it's not necessarily something that makes them feel excited to buy the product. So this is a wonderful, unique little tool that is able to, in the click of a button, rewrite that whole product description into something that tells a story.

[00:09:28] Bella: So it's really all about bringing clients into the world of promo without necessarily working for promo.

[00:09:34] Bobby: My favorite part about that tool is it's just one click and you're done. You're not editing a bunch of things. It's not a bunch of windows. It's just click, boom, magic, and it does really work that smooth. And I think within 24 to 48 hours, we had 350 different people experiencing that. And this is one of those features that when it drops, it's such a subtle but powerful speed tool that I got emails in my inbox. One said, "F yeah, product rewrite descriptor." That's all it said. It was one of my favorite reviews.

[00:09:59] Bobby: So people are loving this. And the other thing, Bella, it's funny, I was in Spotify. I love Spotify as it's grown more and more. They just drop these releases frequently, and sometimes they're quiet. Often they're quiet. And then you go, "Oh, they have audiobooks now. Oh, they have this now." So that's sort of our MO as we're developing more things. But go ahead. What else in Q2?

[00:10:18] Bella: Yeah, on that note of delightful little releases that sometimes go unnoticed, but they hit the right people. They definitely do. We've been trying to make the platform much more operationally efficient, especially for our finance teams and our production teams.

[00:10:32] Bella: I don't work in finance, but when I've had to do my cross-border taxes, I didn't even know if I was gonna be alive at the end of it. For them specifically, they often have to manage the entire reconciliation process for their accounts payables. So not only did we have this refreshed look to financial pages for invoicing and billing, but we also added two new features, which is the ability for those finance teams to issue supplier and client refunds and adjustments.

[00:10:57] Bella: So when something goes wrong, they can source it, and they can resolve it immediately, just like that. And then on top of that, we've also added a new feature called automated billing for EPOs.

[00:11:07] Bobby: Hmm.

[00:11:08] Bella: And this is one that our team got most excited for, putting our little finance hats on, because when a bill is created after sending an EPO, now what the system is able to do is it's able to stack the bill against the PO itself, and detect for 100% matched cases.

[00:11:26] Bella: So all these little nitty-gritty details that kind of go unnoticed, or can kind of go under the radar — you don't notice it until the last minute, and somehow they ruin everything — the system's actually able to detect that. And anything that isn't detected, well, both processes will always follow a manual review.

[00:11:40] Bella: The system will let you know this is 100% confirmed, but it is in your hands at the end of the day to truly confirm that bill. But if the details don't align, that's okay. The system will let you know, and then you'll be able to go back and correct for anything that looks like a mismatch. After those—

[00:11:54] Bobby: Speed and accuracy. Finance people love speed and accuracy.

[00:11:58] Bella: Yeah, exactly. And then moving a little bit more towards our shops territory, we've actually released two micro — micro-macro features is what I like to call them. One is a shop expiration date, and it was actually pitched by our customer, Joanna Coomer,

[00:12:15] Bella: who works for Boxed Sourcing + Production. She's the director of merchandise. And we actually noticed from her feedback specifically that sometimes it can really suck when an order rep or a sales rep is noticing that a shop is about to expire. So now we actually have an ability to notify those reps seven days or one day before the shop actually closes, so that they stay in the loop.

[00:12:38] Bella: Like, continuing this idea of full transparency for the client as well as for the distributors. Everybody's happy. And then we also released pushing products to Shopify. One of the biggest complaints was having to constantly map SKUs to a Shopify store. And so now customers can just go into their commonsku-connected store and push products to Shopify in the click of a button, really tightening that gap and making it more easy for them to use.

[00:13:05] Bobby: So, okay, that's Q2. What's on the horizon for Q3? Any sneak peeks?

[00:13:09] Bella: I'm so happy to be able to answer that question. I do have a sneak peek. So we will imminently be releasing the client catalog, which is the feature I'm most excited about. And this is especially for distributors who are running a lot of program work, where they'll likely need to add the same fixed decorated variant reorders on demand, and this is exactly what that catalog is designed to do.

[00:13:31] Bella: But I know, Bobby, you worked for a distributorship, so you probably know a lot better than I do, on the other hand.

[00:13:36] Bobby: Yeah, for those that don't know — they're listening and maybe new listeners — I was a distributor for 20-plus years, and we did a lot of program and catalog business. I'm so excited about this feature because in our warehouse, we'd be working with a client.

[00:13:46] Bobby: Let's say American Fidelity Insurance was one of our clients, and there was another client that was First Fidelity Bank, right? And if you're in the warehouse, and if you're your customer, you wanna go by one nomenclature. So if it's American Fidelity, we would have item numbers for every item. So the AF01 — I mean, this isn't real scientific, but it was simple.

[00:14:04] Bobby: AF01 was the hat, AF02 was the shirt. You know what I mean? So we had item numbers for that client. We also had First Fidelity Bank over here. You didn't wanna get… they're two different companies. You didn't wanna get them mixed up. So in our warehouse, we had those set up: First Fidelity, FF01, FF02. So it's funny because we had our own system in the warehouse for our team, but it went all the way through to the client, so our reporting and everything would match to that specific item number.

[00:14:25] Bobby: It sounds like such a simple thing, but it's really powerful when it comes to chasing down order history, what's happening with that item, and the fact that we can now map this all the way through is pretty fantastic.

[00:14:37] Bella: Exactly. It's all about tightening that little gap where little things here and there go unnoticed.

[00:14:42] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:14:43] Bella: And then on that note, leading with that momentum, we'll also be coming out with custom domains for shops. So these are commonsku's versions of branded URLs for our customers. It's all about our customer. So you don't necessarily wanna see that shop as coming from commonsku when it's been your work.

[00:14:58] Bella: Yeah, it's powered by commonsku, but at the end of the day, they own that shop. So lots of exciting releases down the line, and happy to pull the curtain.

[00:15:05] Bobby: Awesome. Bella, thanks for joining us, and we'll have you back for next quarter.

[00:15:09] Bella: Sounds good. Thanks for having me.

[00:15:11] Bobby: All right. A few more releases to mention before we wrap. We shipped our ShipStation integration, so you can create shipments, print labels, and sync tracking right from your order. We expanded global search — the bar that pulls up projects, clients, orders, and products from anywhere in commonsku — now faster and reaching more of your data. We made meaningful updates to production reports, giving you a clearer view of what's in production and what needs your attention.

[00:15:35] Bobby: We added Upgrade Product to EPO, a one-click way to connect an eligible product to PromoStandards, so it sends electronic POs with live inventory — no rebuild required. And on Connected Plus, we welcomed Shepenco and iClick this quarter, bringing us to 16 connected suppliers. And looking ahead, there's lots more AI coming.

[00:15:51] Bobby: In fact, so much that we're gonna have Charlie Moscoe, our VP of Product Management, join us. But our AI tools are rolling up inside skubot, our assistant inside the platform. It's in public beta now, but we have a lot more coming with presentations and pricing, and more to come on that. Now, finally, two things worth your time if you're not already reading them.

[00:16:08] Bobby: The Backpack is our trends newsletter. It's incredibly popular — the cultural trends shaping merch and the brands to watch. It's released twice a month, so make sure your team is subscribed, because it's great trend inspo. And The AI Promo Brief is our take on AI for promo: the tools, the advancements, what's real, what's hype.

[00:16:26] Bobby: Both newsletters come out twice a month, and you can grab the link to both in the show notes. Wow, what a quarter. I hope yours was as productive as ours, and a big thank you for tuning into the skucast. If you've enjoyed it, if it's been helpful to you, do this one simple thing: forward it to a promo friend so they can learn too.

[00:16:45] Bobby: This show is produced by me and my colleague, Ritz. Until next time.