Tiana Gamble's first big delivery in promo was 1,000 backpacks for a union hall. She arrived in heeled boots and a dress. Then she found out nobody had paid for the boxes to be carried inside. So she and her first hire hauled the whole truck in themselves.
Nine years later, that small distributorship is Goodmerch Supply. It's a Honolulu team of nearly 30, with clients like Ritz-Carlton and Hawaiian Airlines.
Tiana is president and founder of Goodmerch Supply and of Bikinibird. Bikinibird is a Hawaiian swimwear boutique chain about to open its sixth store, at the Hotel del Coronado. She came to promo from Fox Racing, where she was a design merchandiser, and from Billabong.
On today's show, Bobby Lehew and Tiana get into the corners of hotel merch most people walk past. They talk about why a retail business keeps her merch sharp, and about the notebook that ran her purchase orders before commonsku.
Gift shop merch is the obvious play, and Tiana's team does plenty of it. They also make menus for new restaurants, uniforms, and refillable bottles for water stations. They've filled gifting suites for loyalty members and made anniversary merch for a hotel group turning 150. Her favourite category is the humblest one on the list:
"The best business is I make the cork coasters for a couple of hotels, and those are just reorder."
— Tiana Gamble
Bikinibird started as a swimwear blog in 2014 and opened its first store in 2017. Tiana will tell you merch is the easier business, with fewer leases and less inventory to carry. She keeps the retail side anyway. It sends her to trade shows she'd otherwise skip, puts new lines and designers in front of her, and feeds ideas straight back into Goodmerch. Her fashion years also left her with a network of designers at brands like Vans, which she still calls on.
Goodmerch's first hire came from a fashion background and did everything: mockups, presenting and selling. Tiana, a salesperson by training, split those roles early. Then hotel clients started asking for locally inspired graphics, so she hired two more designers. Today the team designs graphics for hotels, coffee shops and event add-ons. She's careful to say they aren't a full design agency, but clients get design muscle most distributors don't have in-house.
Before commonsku, a purchase order was an email with "Order to place" in the subject line. The PO number was the date. Style, name and colour were typed out by hand, and the artwork was a Dropbox link. Every order got logged in a Five Star notebook and checked off when it delivered.
Tiana joined commonsku when her team was three to five people. At the time she wasn't sure the expense was worth it.
"Adopting the operating system early was the best thing we ever did, because as difficult as it was, I wasn't switching over 20 people to the system."
— Tiana Gamble
Now project history and artwork live under each customer. And a big airline client recently told her team how modern their portal felt.
Alongside commonsku, she runs both companies on EOS. A weekly meeting replaces daily firefighting, and an integrator keeps the agenda tight. Tiana is happily the visionary. Her team's impression of her starts with "Tiana has an idea."
Before the interview, Bobby sits down with Chief Partnerships Officer David Shultz and Technical Product Manager Nathan Poch. They talk about commonsku Payments, which lets distributors take credit card and ACH payments on invoices, sales orders, deposits and shop checkouts. Each payment lands against the right invoice, so nobody has to chase down which shop order a deposit belongs to. The beta is live with a growing group of distributors.
In this episode, we also discuss:
Want a system your team can grow into before you're onboarding 20 people at once? Book a demo and see why 950+ distributors run on commonsku.
Ask skucast
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Try Ask skucast →[00:01:10] commonsku Payments with David Shultz and Nathan Poch
[00:08:17] The hidden categories inside hotel merch
[00:10:19] Why retail keeps inspiring the merch side
[00:11:34] Free sunglasses, thick catalogues, and buying in
[00:13:15] Hand-carrying 1,000 backpacks in a dress
[00:15:52] Taking Goodmerch to the mainland
[00:17:32] Building an in-house design team
[00:19:02] Running two companies on EOS
[00:21:23] From a PO notebook to commonsku
🎙️ Read Full Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Bobby: Nine years ago, our guest turned a small promotional products distributorship into what is now an incredible brand success story. Goodmerch Supply is today a team of around 30 employees in Honolulu, with clients like Ritz-Carlton and Hawaiian Airlines, and with a thriving and growing US business as well.
[00:00:24] On today’s show, we’re exploring what that journey was like and what a fashion buyer’s eye can do when she points that skill toward merch. Welcome to the skucast, the podcast for innovators and maverick thinkers in the promotional product space. My name is Bobby Lehew. I’m glad you’re here. Tiana Gamble is president and founder of Goodmerch Supply and of her retail business, Bikinibird, a swimwear boutique chain which is about to open its sixth store at the Hotel del Coronado in California.
[00:00:53] She came to promo from Fox Racing and Billabong, and she’s built one of the most design-driven distributorships in the business. We talk with Tiana about her in-house design team, running two companies on Oahu, how commonsku impacts her team’s selling model, and a whole lot more. But before we get to Tiana, a quick announcement.
[00:01:10] commonsku Payments is here. Now, what is commonsku Payments? Well, credit card and ACH payments can now be taken right inside commonsku, making it a whole lot easier on invoices, sales orders, deposits, and shop checkouts, with the invoice marked paid the moment the money comes through and the settlements posting to QuickBooks Online every night.
[00:01:29] Reconciliation stops being that end-of-month nightmare. I sat down with Dave, our chief partnerships officer, and Nathan, our technical product manager, for just a few minutes here to talk about why we built it and what it means for your business and your cash flow. Here’s that quick chat.
Welcome, Dave and Nathan.
[00:01:46] Nathan: Hi, Bobby.
[00:01:47] Dave: Hey, Bobby.
[00:01:48] Bobby: Dave is our chief partnerships officer. What made payments the right thing for commonsku to build?
[00:01:52] Dave: Well, you know, honestly, it comes down to watching how our distributors actually work, and Nathan can touch on this in a lot more detail. But you think about the way a distributor works in commonsku: they build the presentation, they win the order, they manage production with the supplier, they invoice the end client, and all of that currently lives in commonsku.
[00:02:09] And then the money shows up, and suddenly they’re working in a separate system, you know? Maybe they’re waiting on checks, or they take a card on another processor, and then they’re having to key that payment into an accounting platform and then match it back to the right invoice. So they’ve got double entry, they’ve got manual reconciliation.
[00:02:24] It’s slow, it’s error-prone, and frankly, nobody got into this business to do that.
[00:02:28] Nathan: Right.
[00:02:29] Dave: So a truly integrated payments platform is kind of a missing piece of our commonsku connected workflow. You know, if we can take an order all the way from idea to cash in one place, then the payments post against the invoice automatically, reconciliation stops being this giant monthly headache, and the distributor, frankly, gets all those hours back to start, you know, spending more time building relationships and selling.
[00:02:51] So it wasn’t really about adding a new feature so much as it was, for us, about closing the loop on what our customers are already doing in commonsku today.
[00:02:57] Bobby: I know our audience hears us talk about connected workflow a lot, but this truly is that kind of thing. And I’m real surprised by how many distributors are still not accepting ACH or credit card or faster payments, because of cash flow.
[00:03:09] I mean, cash flow is just so critical to running a business today, especially when things move so fast.
[00:03:15] Dave: It is. And in this industry in particular, if you’ve been in this industry long enough, you know that money moves in mysterious ways. You know, a lot of distributors don’t have terms agreements with their key suppliers, so you think about, like, a big order: they’re committing dollars to a supplier for the goods and decoration well before the end client pays them.
[00:03:32] And so, you know, in many cases, every order you win puts cash out the door first. That means growth can actually hurt you. If you land a big program, you may need a line of credit just to fund it. So if you think about it, the faster you get paid, the less your cash is tied up waiting. You know, there’s some research out there from Xero and Forrester and others that says if you have invoices with built-in payment platforms, you could shave roughly two-thirds off the time you wait on payments to come in.
[00:03:58] And so when you have that cash flow working for you, you can grow gracefully, as opposed to sitting around waiting for cash all the time.
[00:04:04] Bobby: Yeah. Well said. Nathan, why use commonsku Payments over something else?
[00:04:07] Nathan: As Dave was saying, it’s all in one place to start with, so when the payment comes in, we know which invoice it needs to be marked as paid.
[00:04:16] We can push that information over to QuickBooks to make sure that both systems are in sync, and it really just cuts down on time. You know, you’re not spending hours reconciling and poring over spreadsheets, and it frees up your finance folks to do more meaningful work other than going over a spreadsheet and finding, “Hey, that payment from that shop three weeks ago is not lining up here somewhere.”
[00:04:41] What do we do with it? Right? It’s automated, it’s easy, and less stuff slips through the cracks, so it saves you time. At the end of the day, it saves you time, and it’s all in one place.
[00:04:52] Bobby: That reconciliation is no longer a nightmare in that sense, too. How quickly does a card or ACH payment reach a distributor’s bank once it’s taken?
[00:05:00] Nathan: Cards, I believe, are T+2, so it’s two days to make it to the bank for cards, and it’s four days for ACH.
[00:05:06] Bobby: Okay. And Nathan, how’s the beta going? How many distributors are taking part now, and how’s it going with them?
[00:05:11] Nathan: The beta’s going really well. We have, I think, 10 distributors actively on.
[00:05:15] Aaron Kucherawy is adding people week by week, and they’re loving it. You know, they’re running tons of transactions through, and we’re seeing a lot of great success.
[00:05:24] Bobby: What does the payments dashboard show a finance team that they couldn’t see before?
[00:05:28] Nathan: So the biggest benefit is that we’ve actually exported a bunch of data from commonsku into separate columns in that dashboard.
[00:05:38] So when you export that data, you can actually see what’s the project name, what’s the project number, what’s the invoice number, what’s the shop name, what’s the shop number, what’s the transaction ID. So if there’s something that you need to chase down and reconcile, it’s all right there, and you can use, you know, your favourite Excel query to go and figure it all out, or throw your best friend Claude at it, and, you know, it’s just able to figure it all out a lot faster, ’cause it’s got the data.
[00:06:05] Bobby: Cool. Last question. What part of the build are you most proud of, Nathan? You’ve had a hand in this. You work with a lot of clients, especially enterprise clients. What are you proud of about this?
[00:06:16] Nathan: Honestly, I’m so proud of the team for everything they accomplished. We were given a very tight timeline to deliver this project and have it in customer hands, and they delivered on the day.
[00:06:26] So, you know, if you’ve been around software for any length of time, software rarely gets delivered on time and accurately. It’s just the nature of software. Bugs happen, things happen, deploys go sideways. This one, they delivered every single piece of it on time, on budget, and it worked great.
[00:06:48] Bobby: Awesome. Nathan, congrats to you, the engineering team, and Dave for shepherding this thing through. Thank you both for joining us for a quick chat about payments.
Dave: Absolutely. Thanks, Bobby.
[00:06:57] Nathan: Thanks, Bobby.
[00:06:58] Bobby: Thanks to Nathan and Dave for hopping on to chat about payments. And now to my conversation with Goodmerch Supply’s Tiana Gamble.
[00:07:04] Tiana, welcome to the skucast.
Tiana: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Bobby. I am a huge fangirl of yours, so it’s always fun.
Bobby: I was just telling Tiana before we hit record what a big fanboy I am of their brand, their company, their team. I just love every time I get to interact with you guys. Okay, so I have a very easy question to kick us off.
[00:07:21] Because you are in such a beautiful location, what does an average morning in the life look like for you?
Tiana: Oh, well, you have to add in that I’m also a mother of two. So my average morning is preparing the kids, getting them out the door. I mean, I would love to say that I’m frolicking in the ocean first thing in the morning—
Bobby: That’s what we thought.
[00:07:40] Tiana: Yeah. But I do go for a walk in the back, in the beautiful mountains, and usually, if the kids leave in our carpool scenario, I will jump in the ocean. My CFO and I have surfed once this year together, which was really fun.
Bobby: Cool.
Tiana: But it’s not as frequent as I would hope.
Bobby: Well, I know the business, and you’re busy, and it’s crazy all the time.
[00:08:02] But you’re in Maui today, I think, right?
Tiana: I am on Maui today. Yes. I’m here just doing some work. We work with a few of the hotels. And then I also have a second business, which I make a lot of merch for, Bikinibird. So I’m here for that as well.
Bobby: I wanna talk about that.
[00:08:17] Since you already talked about the hotels, some of your clients are Pendry, Ritz-Carlton, Turtle Bay, Ritz-Carlton Santa Barbara. These are some incredible hotels on your team’s client list. I’m so envious of such a client list. And hotel, I’m assuming it’s all kinds of categories.
[00:08:34] We always jump to hotel gift shop merch as a potential category. Are there other categories, though? Do you just tend to do lots of different types of projects for these companies?
Tiana: Oh, yes. Absolutely. It’s sales. We work with food and beverage, so we’ve done menus for new restaurants that open. We do uniforms for multiple restaurants.
[00:08:53] The best business is I make the cork coasters for a couple of hotels, and those are just reorder. It’s a great reorder business.
Bobby: Oh, great business.
Tiana: Water bottles in hotels for refillable stations. Yeah, I mean, the opportunities are endless, to be honest. And then there’s a lot of anniversaries. So a big hotel group that we work with, it’s their 150th anniversary.
[00:09:13] Bobby: Wow.
Tiana: So we do a lot of that type of merch. There’s also the Sheraton Hotel, which is a chain, but they do a little gifting suite if you’re a certain level of member. So you walk through this little experience down in their hotel, and we’ve continued to fill that as well.
Bobby: Very cool.
Tiana: So there’s a whole lot of nooks and crannies in the hotel business that you can go after, for sure.
Bobby: Love that.
[00:09:36] Explain Bikinibird for those that don’t... I mentioned it in the intro, but explain Bikinibird.
Tiana: Okay. So Bikinibird is a locally run Hawaiian bikini boutique chain. We started as an online blog. We would write about the best, the newest swim that was coming out, designers that were friends of ours, or where they started, where they come from, places they love to travel.
[00:09:57] And then that turned into a store that we opened in 2017. Online, we started in 2014, and then 2017 was our first store. And now we’re opening our sixth store in San Diego at the Hotel del Coronado on November 15th.
Bobby: Congratulations.
Tiana: But yeah, we have two on Maui and three on Oahu.
Bobby: Wow, congratulations.
[00:10:19] Tiana: Thank you. And I like the parallel between merch and fashion, because I always ask myself... Merch has been a great business and I love it. I love being in it, and believe it or not, it’s easier than retail, because you’re not having to deal with as many leases and overhead and inventory.
[00:10:37] Obviously, there’s a bunch of other types of problems that come with merch. I always ask myself why I’m still in the retail side of it. But I think it inspires the merch. I go to trade shows that I wouldn’t typically go to if I had only stayed in merch. And then I’ll get inspired. I’ll see new lines.
[00:10:52] I’ll meet new designers. So that’s been the most inspiring part, and the reason why I keep going. Not to mention, it is a passion of mine. I love Bikinibird. It’s like a little fun thing that I do on the side.
Bobby: Juggling a small family and two full-time businesses, that’s admirable. You also answered a question I had, which was how those two complement each other.
[00:11:14] Now I can see how trends and things on the retail side impact merch. So in 2017, you were a fashion sales exec. You were introduced to the promo business and you acquired a distributorship, and nine years later, that’s now Goodmerch Supply. What did you see in the merch industry that you thought was intriguing enough that you were like, “Okay, I think that’s something I wanna do”?
[00:11:34] Tiana: Okay. Well, I think back to this party I went to in, like, 2001, right? It was like a surf trade show, and everyone got a free pair of glasses. Or, like, they were throwing them out, right? And whoever could get them first. It was like this big thing. And so my friend and I both got two different types of sunglasses, and we were, like, fighting over them.
[00:11:52] And that’s just a core memory to me of just how effective merch can be in an experience. Like, I’ll never forget, it was like a T-Pain concert. I have no idea. But any time I would be at any event, I’m always that person that loves to know what they’re giving away. So when I went into this couple’s business, which was nothing glamorous, I mean, it was like folding tables from Costco with, like, a huge stack of catalogues.
[00:12:18] I mean, thick, huge, old-school catalogues. And that’s what enticed me, I guess, into the business. But I think what I realized was I didn’t know that there was this world of merch. I knew that I’d get something free, but I didn’t know how it worked. And I had ordered through John Lowe, actually, through Bikinibird.
[00:12:36] I had a party, and someone in the bikini industry is related to him, and she was like, “My cousin John,” who is... we call him the Mayor, by the way. I don’t know if you’ve heard this term for John.
Bobby: I love that.
Tiana: But he had done some koozies and some cups for me. When I went to see this business, I was like, “Wow.
[00:12:56] Oh, look at this catalogue. I mean, there’s, like, everything, like chip clips and pens, and...” And I felt like there was this cool opportunity to make it just more modern. And look, there’s all these options, and that’s what they give me at a party or at an event. And the interesting thing about the business is, when I bought it, I didn’t really ask about the client list.
[00:13:15] I knew how much revenue it was doing. It was doing around $800,000 in revenue. And I knew they gave me a client list, but I didn’t really look at the client list. I sort of just was like, “Okay, great, I’ll go after those clients,” and I went with him on the road for a month. Well, they were all construction companies, unions, painters.
[00:13:33] I mean, I came in this fashion outfit to these guys, just like, Local 680 or whatever, whichever one I went to, and I was so naive. I mean, the girl that I hired, my first hire, and I delivered 1,000 backpacks to this union. And the gentleman that was handing it off, who’s 76 years old, was like, “Okay, so when it delivers, you’re gonna tell him that you have to bill him for the shipping when it’s done.”
[00:13:57] And so anyway, I get a call, the truck’s getting delivered, so I come in my heeled boots with, like, this—
Bobby: This cute dress.
Tiana: Fashion, exactly. And the guy goes, “Well, they—” Yes, yes. He’s like, “You didn’t pay for it to come inside. You have to walk these boxes into the building.” So Christie and I, in a dress.
[00:14:14] He wouldn’t help me. It was like this macho thing, like, “This is your business now. You need to do it.” So we literally hand-carried, like, a truck, you know? Anyway, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. So the first year was really tough. I was among mostly male-dominated businesses and had to win them over first to maintain the business, and then kind of went into more of the really fun businesses I had imagined working with.
[00:14:41] Bobby: Yeah. And with your background, I would think that having that fashion background especially, and the retail background, was such a great beginning for you, even though maybe you couldn’t have seen it at the time. In hindsight, having that as your DNA has to be so helpful building a modern merch company.
[00:14:59] Tiana: Yeah. There’s always people, like, “What is it like to be an entrepreneur?” And I always say, I think I was 39 when I bought the business. I was a design merchandiser before that for Fox Racing, a motocross company, and managed women’s designers and graphic designers, tops designers, bottoms designers, knit designers.
[00:15:14] So you kinda start to learn how to work with people, and then, being an employee, what that feels like. So by the time I started running my own business, I’m empathetic to a lot of those things that maybe you wouldn’t be if you tried to start it much earlier in life. And then on top of that, I have a network of designers I’ve worked with in different industries.
[00:15:35] So I’m always reaching out to someone that I met who works at Vans now, or works at a lot of different businesses. So that’s been a really good bonus to entering this business through fashion, for sure.
Bobby: You fast-forward to today. Your women-led team, you have such an amazing team. How many folks do you have now?
[00:15:52] Tiana: 27 women and two men.
Bobby: And you’ve talked about taking Goodmerch to the mainland. Where does that expansion stand today?
Tiana: So it’s at 35% of our business today, which has been great. It’s always good to see us growing. I hired a sales rep in Southern California, so she runs a lot of our key accounts there.
[00:16:14] We’ve gotten really lucky with Hawaiian Airlines. We do their store, and they’ve just recently merged with Alaska Airlines, so that’s kind of helped us grow into other categories as well. So that’s sort of where we are at this point.
Bobby: I know you do a lot of business in the US, but we’re just curious, what’s it like to run a distributorship in Hawaii?
[00:16:34] Is it any different, do you think, than the US?
Tiana: I don’t think Hawaii is any different than maybe a family-run business in the Midwest. I would say more intimate and more heart, as far as, like, I feel for everyone, and I know their families, and you’re gonna see them maybe on the weekend somewhere.
[00:16:50] It’s not as corporate, I’d say, probably, as it would be if I had run it out of LA or something. Also, people are very loyal, and this is their career. I think, you know, maybe in other states you’re kind of like, “I’m gonna be here for a couple years and then I’m gonna do something else.”
[00:17:08] And I think there’s not a lot of options in Hawaii as far as this industry, right? In being creative and being able to build a career in fashion or in design. And so, at least in my mind, it’s my responsibility to offer them the opportunity to grow in the business and for them to stay around. So I’m always pushing to grow the business, and I know I can continue to grow here and maintain, but I’d love the idea of expanding.
[00:17:32] Bobby: Yeah. Goodmerch, you keep an in-house design team, and I think so much of this is from your fashion and design focus. But how else does that structure your team differently? And is that in-house design team because of that focus on trends and fashion?
Tiana: Yeah, I mean, it started with having one designer that did mockups, and also my first hire was one of my friends who had worked at this place called Crazy Shirts, and she worked at Gap prior to that, in fashion.
[00:18:02] So she comes from a fashion background as well. When she started, she would sort of do the mockups herself, and then we’d be presenting. So she was like this artist that did both, which I hear is the case in most distributorships: there’s kind of a designer slash they do sales. And then, because I come from sales, we separated that out. I made our sales reps separate, and then we hired another two designers to sort of take on—
[00:18:25] I think a lot of the hotels wanted more locally inspired graphics. So then we started doing more graphic work for them, and then it went on to small businesses like, you know, coffee shops. I wouldn’t say we’re a full-blown design agency in that sense, but we will do graphics for clients that we work with, and maybe they wanna add on.
[00:18:48] They have an event that they’re looking at doing.
Bobby: Continuing to speak about your organization and your structure, I noticed there’s an integrator on your leadership page alongside a CFO and a general manager. Sounds like you run EOS. How has EOS changed you and the way you think in your business?
[00:19:02] Tiana: Well, I think it’s a game changer. I think running both Bikinibird and Goodmerch under EOS has allowed me to have the freedom to kind of work on my business. When I was in my 20s and given an important job, I think I really just wanted to run it myself. I didn’t need to be micromanaged, so I try to remind myself of that.
[00:19:25] Meeting in EOS really helped me to say, “Okay, just focus on what’s really important, ideas, those problems,” once a week, versus, you know, every day you’re putting out a fire. There’s a lot of things that other people are capable of doing without, you know, you having to solve.
Bobby: Yeah, yeah. And you sound like the visionary to me for the business.
[00:19:46] Tiana: Yes, we did identify that very early on. When they make fun of me or they impersonate me, they all say, like, “I have an idea. I have an idea. Tiana has an idea.” So I’m definitely the ideator. And I realized that through personality tests and through EOS. It did teach me, you know, everyone’s gift.
[00:20:03] And you sort of... Not everyone can come up with an idea. So when I’m like, “You guys, why are you not thinking about this?” it’s because that’s not the way their brain works. Their brain likes to be organized. So I brought the integrator in, who was a longtime friend of mine and is a little more, I’d say, mature in the corporate world, and so it was really good for my team.
[00:20:24] My team was fairly young. Everyone was in their early 20s to mid-20s, and they’re finally getting to their late 20s. But I think it was just good to have someone else in the room that sort of could lead. Before she started, we really didn’t even have an agenda in our meetings. It was pretty loose.
[00:20:40] Bobby: Well, for those that are listening and you’ve not heard of EOS, you can put a pin in this idea, because we have an announcement coming soon about an EOS partnership with more distributors, and we can talk about that a little bit later. But speaking of successful operating systems that run your business, it’s so funny to me how many distributors, as they grow and they get to your size, which is a successful-size business, adopt EOS and commonsku.
[00:21:04] It seems like they run these two in parallel, where EOS is running sort of that esoteric part of the business, with vision and strategy and tactical ways to hit goals, and then commonsku, the operating side. How has commonsku transformed the way you and your team, as you’ve had a growing team, have done business?
[00:21:23] Tiana: One of the main core values in our business is to be flexible. And I remember, you know, I don’t know what year I joined commonsku, but I do remember there was maybe three or four of us on the team, maybe five, and I was like, “I don’t know if this expense is worth it.” But I really have to say, adopting the operating system early was the best thing we ever did, because as difficult as it was, I wasn’t switching over 20 people to the system.
[00:21:50] Bobby: Listen, I know you’ve got some notes there on how you used to do business. Is that what it is?
Tiana: Yes. I have to go back and talk to the team about what exactly we did, ’cause I kind of forgot. But yeah, so we would create an email. We’d look up the item, and then to send a PO, we would write in the email subject, “Order to place.”
[00:22:11] And then our PO number was the date that we placed the order. So it would be, like, you know, whatever—
Bobby: Oh, wow.
Tiana: 8/19/26. Yes. Right. And then we’d add the details, like, you’d put the style number, and then the name, and then the colour, handwritten, right? And then we’d add our Dropbox links, or download it and then upload it back up, which was, like, a whole other thing.
[00:22:29] And then it’d be all the threats, like “Please,” in hand, highlighted red. And so anyway, it was this whole thing that we’d write. Then we’d write it down in a notebook, a PO notebook. It was just a normal Five Star notebook, you know?
Bobby: Wow.
Tiana: And then make an invoice in QuickBooks, send that to the customer, and then I would check off when it was delivered, off of this book.
[00:22:52] And that was the way it was done prior to commonsku.
Bobby: Wow. And now you have nearly 30 employees. How is that now, as you’ve scaled and grown? We have found that commonsku performs best with teams, particularly team selling. How is that helping you and your team and your leadership team with transparency and just keeping track of things?
[00:23:17] Tiana: I mean, it’s just all in one place, an interface that holds everything in one area, and you can go back and look at the history of a project. Artwork is saved under that customer name. Yeah, I think it’s incredibly helpful. I don’t really know of any other system that does it as well, and I just think it helps that Cathy and Mark have both been in the business.
[00:23:39] You’ve been in the business. You just know what the challenges are, so you can anticipate them. I would say there was an account recently, a big account, Alaska Airlines, maybe, but they had mentioned how much they loved our portal and just how modern we were with doing business. So I do think—a nod to you all for giving us the tool to show clients this way, the system. So that was great.
[00:24:06] Bobby: I love that. Wow, that’s high praise coming from a big client. That’s music to us. So thank you for sharing that. I’m real curious about some simpler things. On weekends you paddle out, have canoes in Waikiki with your daughters, and growing up in Hawaii, as you put it.
[00:24:22] You know, what has just being in that environment taught you as a human being and running a business? We’re so intrigued by your business. I know we over-romanticize it, you know? Because you’re still running a couple of businesses. But how has that experience in Hawaii sort of changed the way you think about life and business?
[00:24:41] Tiana: Yeah. One, it’s like a dream. I am grateful that I have a business that’s successful in Hawaii, and I think you hope that you can build something that you can live off of and have children there and raise your family. And my husband is a distributor in food, which is ironic, ’cause he’s slinging pork and I’m slinging, like, pens.
[00:25:01] That’s what I always say. But the good thing about Hawaii is there’s not a ton of distractions. I guess you could go do a lot of things out and about, but it’s really family-oriented, and on the weekends you can kind of slow down and have nature, you know? There’s not a ton of shopping there.
[00:25:18] I wouldn’t say it’s the place to do a lot of that. So you’re usually doing something outdoors more. I don’t know, it’s just a very family-oriented place. So I do love that about Hawaii, for sure. And people always ask, “Do you get rock fever?” But I think when you’re so busy, even having a weekend to do nothing is, like, a gift.
[00:25:39] You’re like, “Yes.”
Bobby: Yeah. Especially in this stressful, deadline-driven business. And plus, you know, you have the retail business. I have two last questions for you. One is, who was your favourite speaker at skucamp, and what did you enjoy about that experience? ’Cause you went all the way to Montréal.
[00:25:54] You’ve been at a few of our events. You’ve been at skucon. You’ve been at skucamp. What did you enjoy about that? I mean, AI obviously was a huge part.
Tiana: Well, I just learned so much being at the meeting about AI, and the way people are using AI and the way they’re applying AI, and that was a big—
[00:26:10] I mean, I’d been using AI, but to the point where someone was explaining how they’ll check all of the tracking, and then when a customer asks, it will go in, find the tracking, and set up a draft to respond. Or someone said that a customer would inquire, and then AI would come in and check in commonsku if it was a customer or not.
[00:26:36] Bobby: Well, I think what I love most about AI in this current culture that we’re in is just sitting across the table from other people running a business just like yours and having them talk about their experience with AI. It’s one of the most helpful things that can happen. I’m putting you on the spot, because I didn’t warn you I would ask you this, but, you know, you’ve now run a successful business.
[00:26:55] You lead a very creative, cool team. I’ve met some of your team members. Looking back at your younger self, how would you encourage Tiana as she was younger, knowing what you know now, buying into that business, not having a clue about the merch business? How would you encourage her?
[00:27:12] What would you say to her if you had a chance?
Tiana: Oh. Oh, wow. I think I would say, “You’re capable of way more than you think you are.” ’Cause I don’t think I would have even imagined that I could run a business or run a team. I mean, I knew I was a leader. It was always sort of in my DNA. Any business that I worked with, I would always kind of get put as a leader.
[00:27:35] I’m always positive and very optimistic. But I think just knowing that there would be a team that I could lead... I think I would have told myself, “Have more confidence in yourself.” I didn’t realize I’m the biggest risk-taker in my whole group. In my entire group, they’re like, “Tiana, you’re the biggest risk-taker.”
[00:27:54] I’m like, “Really?” But I think, knowing that, I probably would have taken more risks at a younger age.
Bobby: That’s really good advice. I love that. Okay, so my last question. Anything lately you’ve watched or read that’s been really inspiring or changed the way you think about business?
Tiana: I mean, I’m always reading multiple books.
[00:28:15] A book I’m reading right now is Theo of Golden. Have you heard of that book?
Bobby: Oh, no.
Tiana: It’s a book about this guy who sort of just moves to this town called Golden, and he buys all these pictures on a wall from this café, and then he starts to give them out to different people across the town.
[00:28:36] The interesting thing about it is, I think, just the human connection and sort of breaking down the walls between people. And I always tell my sales team, it’s that sort of empathetic personality IQ, to understand and connect with people, and I think that’s the biggest thing to apply to merch. Yes, we need to sell something, but the reality is, what is the goal?
[00:29:00] How are we trying to connect, and how are we trying to connect to this brand and that person, right? If she’s the marketing director at this place, don’t connect just because you want an order. Connect because you wanna connect. It’s another person in your life that’s gonna be your friend. I mean—
[00:29:17] If I’m out of this industry one day, Bobby, you’ll still be my friend. We made a genuine connection. So that’s really what the book inspired me to believe more. But I think just sharing that more with the sales team and my team, it’s like, have that genuine connection.
[00:29:34] It’s just good for the soul more than it is for the business, you know?
Bobby: Totally. What a great response to end on. It’s all good. I love that. Tiana, thank you. Thank you for joining us.
Tiana: Well, thank you.