A broad view of my 8.5 years with the best company to sign my paycheck. With The Hundreds, I spearheaded multiple platform migrations and web shop redesigns. My role did not include design, but did encompass UX for eCommerce.
These are a few of the brands within The Hundreds' umbrella, for which I was responsible for all web shop management, online sales, fulfillment, and customer service:
In Feb. '09, I moved to Los Angeles CA. No job, no prospects, and terrible timing. The recession hit literally as I was packing. But I pressed on, moved to mid-city, and knocked on every door I could to find work. Being a fan of streetwear, my rounds included Fairfax Ave., and of course stopping by The Hundreds on Rosewood. Somehow a friend knew a guy, who knew the warehouse manager at the time, and got me in as a warehouse grunt packing boxes and doing whatever else I they had for me.
Eventually my days focusing on accurately shipping online orders went noticed by the big boss Ben Hundreds, and this just so happened to coincide with ballooning growth for The Hundreds eComm. I was in the right place at the right time, and put in charge of the entire department. Within a year I was out of the warehouse on a desk post, dealing with all customer service, inventory management, chargeback claims, lost packages, and the lot.
Here's a few of my favorite flicks from my time at The Hundreds:
During these years, I built the eComm department from one single desk and packing station, to three fully-equipped customer service terminals and four packing stations. We handled millions of dollars worth of gross annual sales, all processed by myself and crew.
I was responsible for sales forecasting and pre-booking of all in-line apparel production, collaborative releases, and capsule collections to be sold. Our team received stock from the wholesale warehouse, counted-in, added to stock, circulated racks for snake organization per-season, and regularly cycle-counted/restocked past season merchandise.
This work included crafting periodic sales campaigns which required integration with various digital marketing platforms such as Constant Contact, MailChimp, and Klaviyo. Of course my duties also included providing a daily sales report, accompanied by Google Analytics insights. Thankfully our team eventually grew large enough to include a designated Digital Marketing specialist to learn from. (shout out Ceilidh!).
In fulfilling my duties as Online Sales Manager, I was lucky enough to establish valued relationships with peers, coworkers and associates over the years. These relationships continue today.
Developer relationships / platform migrations
Now a brief on my most trying time at The Hundreds...
We'd been using Magento without too much trouble, and then our Magento 2.0 migration turned out to be a tad overly ambitious. Meaning that we attempted to simultaneously perform this migration to coincide with a front-end website re-design, and a warehousing software integration to the eComm backend. Using Full Circle for warehousing and having online operate as a stand-alone retailer having separate racks within the same space, allowed us to maintain isolated inventory and avoid the possible inaccuracies involved with wholesale and marketing activity.
The headache began with a particular warehouse manager that didn't like my micromanaging of online inventory numbers and insistence on warehousing separate inventories. So by encouraging this Full Circle + Magento 2.0 integration, he could save warehouse space by keeping one rack of inventory with online product numbers coexisting in the same box with wholesale quantities per SKU.
I don't have to tell you that this drastically decreased accuracy.
Problem was that given the nature of The Hundreds, and rapidly-selling, limited-edition merchandise; items would often sell out of all stock within minutes of pushing live. And because the API key integration sharing quantities between platforms saw a 15 minute latency, often as a result items would be over-sold to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise. Thanks to our team's efforts, all customers were always contacted with the chance to replace missing items for alternate size/color/or styles at equal value.
8 years into my time at The Hundreds, we redesigned the website yet again. This time we aimed for a move from Magento 2.0 to Shopify Plus, and a decoupling from warehousing software. The transition was smooth and exciting, and without a doubt sparked my interest in UX Design.
2013
2017
After leaving The Hundreds, I always have love in my heart. With them in mind whenever it comes to fashion, this was my first attempt at designing an apparel collection line sheet.
Dream collaboration between one of my favorite movies and the best apparel brand in the world!
