Imagine if someone offered you the chance to add to your company efficiency and take away some of the cost of doing business. And imagine if there were a way to streamline the process of some of your day-to-day tasks, freeing you up to focus on other more important concerns.
Would you want to know what that is? Does it sound too good to be true?
Well, I’m happy to tell you it’s not too good to be true at all. In fact, NASGW has for the past couple of years been working toward the creation of something that can do just that. And this spring, through the newly created NASGW Solutions Corp., we’re launching a business tool designed to save time, money and create amazing efficiencies for manufacturers, distributors and retailers in the shooting sports industry.
One of the greatest challenges in our industry has been, and remains, finding accurate product information and data, including photography assets and product attributes. A casual search of the internet could lead you to multiple photos with multiple color backgrounds, sizes and descriptions for a product that’s actually supposed to be the same exact thing. Though often you’d be hard pressed to know it based on what you discover. Worse yet, a customer might order an item relying on an image they see only to realize when the product arrives, it’s absolutely not what they thought they were ordering. This is true in business-to-business (B2B) relationships and business-to-consumer (B2C) sales too. It can lead to upset customers and certainly to extra cost and confusion.
About 20 years ago, NASGW tried to solve this ongoing problem by creating a digital product information catalog. Unfortunately, that effort never saw the light of day. Lucky for us, technology has come a long way in the last two decades and it’s given our organization the opportunity to solve this problem once and for all. Other industries have already implemented similar solutions. Now, it’s our turn.
Enter VAULT, a digital product information exchange exclusively for the shooting sports community.
VAULT is your ultimate digital platform for standardized, accurate product data. With VAULT, you’ll be able to enhance efficiency and reduce errors with consistent descriptions, specifications, and imagery for manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. VAULT is going to revolutionize how product information and data are distributed throughout the shooting sports industry.
We’ve been meeting with distributors, manufacturers and retailers and all of them tell the same story, getting accurate and dependable visual and descriptive assets can be a crap shoot. The current system we have is simply not efficient and there’s a massive amount of duplication. This can make it exceptionally challenging for a major manufacturer to protect their brand, it certainly makes it challenging for a distributor to keep track of the thousands and thousands of products and for a retailer trying to build customer traffic, it’s a nightmare finding accurate photos and details to use in their promotional efforts.
VAULT aims to solve all of that.
Manufacturers win because they’ll be able to control their brand images, descriptions and attributes at a much higher level. They’ll be able to place their items in one spot and avoid the time and resource drain by having to ship these assets to multiple locations. Simply tell your customers that they can find all the info on VAULT, and let them do the work.
Distributors win because keeping track of thousands upon thousands of products and all the details about each of those products is a monumental task. When you consider that multiple distributors are essentially replicating the work of their competitors, you start to realize there is a lot of duplicity and waste in time and money. The VAULT digital product information exchange can save them enormous amounts of time and money, allowing them to focus efforts on better customer service and enhancing their relationships with both suppliers and retailers.
Retailers win because they no longer have to wonder if they’ll be able to find the “right” image and description of products for their print and digital marketing efforts. VAULT will make it simple to gather everything you need to build a flyer and know you’ve got the right photos and descriptions. Additionally, VAULT gives retailers the potential of product discovery, since this will be the gateway for new products, and product insight right at their fingertips, improving their customer’s experience. Simply log into VAULT to access an industry wide catalog of products.
By creating an online warehouse of these items, all in one location, all accessible in real time, with standardized information and image sizes, the entire industry can be singing from the same songbook. What this means is that ultimately, customers win. VAULT allows for a base set of facts, figures and photos to be available to everyone. Lifestyle and other photos can also be added if a company chooses to do so, or those can be alternative marketing efforts for specific purposes and specific campaigns. Meanwhile, there will be one, true source for basic accurate and needed information, the stuff most everyone uses every day.
VAULT, because it’s proctored, and will contain product information supplied by the very people who made those products, will be as accurate and dependable as humanly possible. Over time, and with consistent support of the initiative, we’ll build an unmatched catalog of industry facts and photos.
To say we’re excited is an understatement. To say this has been a challenge is also an understatement. But the industry needs this, and it’s long overdue. The NASGW has built some incredible partnerships in this program and in the coming weeks you’ll be seeing more and more information about this project. We look forward to a more formal launch soon. In the meantime, if you’re wondering where you’ll soon be able to go to retrieve accurate photos and product details, well, you can find it at itsonvault.com.
We’ve gone back in time, to bring you the future.
Until next time,
Kenyon Gleason
NASGW President