Client Success Story: Stampin' Up!Distributor Hosted Web Sites ApplicationThe CompanyStampin' Up! is a 15-year-old direct-sales company that offers an exclusive line of decorative stamp sets and accessories for home decor, greeting cards, craft projects, and scrap booking. The company's size and steady growth reflect the nationwide passion for decorative rubber stamping. Founded in 1988, the company now employs more than 400 employees. Stampin' Up! introduces more than 100 new stamp sets and accessories annually in its full-color Idea Book & Catalog, now more than 250 pages. Stampin' Up! products may be purchased at home workshops through a network of independent sales distributors. Currently, there are almost 30,000 distributors from all 50 U.S. states and Canada who teach the art of stamping. Stampin' Up! operates three state-of-the-art facilities, including a 40,000-square-foot manufacturing facility; an 110,000-square-foot distribution and warehouse center; and a 40,000-square-foot corporate office and demonstrator support call center. The ChallengeStampin' Up! needed a way to offer thousands of independent distributors the ability to promote their business over the Internet. At the same time, Stampin' Up! needed to maintain important corporate communication standards such as a creative look and controlled content to protect their valuable leading brand. Since the distributor demographic is a casual web user, Stampin' Up! needed to provide a very simple tool that would allow distributors to easily configure their own site, with custom content that met corporate criteria, all within a hosted solution. The site had to support various themes, multiple color combination families, and multiple templates. Distributors had to have the ability to create their own messages and upload images of people, art, and product specials. Automated content validation needed to be included to screen for inappropriate material including obscenities and copyrights. The hosted sites had to be available on a 24x7 basis, and support up to 30,000 distributors. The SolutionSpring2 Technologies worked closely with Stampin' Up!to develop a large scale hosted web-site application in Microsoft .NET that allowed Stampin' Up! to preserve their brand while giving distributors the flexibility to create unique, yet controlled web sites to promote their business. A short development window was realized through use of the Spring2 SpringBoardTM .NET toolset that provided automated code generation and re-use of software code templates and classes. Distributors can select from a number of different templates, customize their own messages within the templates, download images and set-up calendars all within the framework of the corporate brand. The Spring2 solution allows each distributor to easily develop a web site with a unique look and feel using a simple initialization "wizard'. Sample "boilerplate" text can be chosen from three different themes, and then multiple templates and color combinations within each theme can be altered for personal taste. After going through the wizard, real-time immediate web previews are available as graphical or text content is changed. Automated content validation screens text for inappropriate words and copyright violations. The system allows distributors to upload unique content in the form of images and text, within corporate designed templates, thus maintaining the integrity of the corporate brand. The product has an event scheduling system that allows distributors to schedule and post their own events such as demonstrations, workshops, special events. Corporate events such as national conferences are superimposed on local distributor calendars. The system also allows each distributor to run their own product specials in conjunction with any corporate specials. For example, the distributor could run free shipping for a certain month, or promote a specific product. Corporate events are also shown along side the distributor events. An "Art Gallery" feature allows distributors to upload art images and add descriptions of techniques and a list of sku's to order for completing an art project. Once signed up users are automatically charged on a monthly basis. If there is a problem with the card, they are automatically notified. The Technologies
The Results
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