Icebreaker picks cross platform app for sales team

The merino wool apparel company says more than 80 of Icebreaker’s account managers and some distributors are using the system across 12 of the 43 countries Icebreaker is sold in.

The company rolled out the project in around five weeks early this year using the equivalent of one full time project manager.

Icebreaker turned to aWorkbook, a cross platform sales enablement tool designed by UK based Hark Solutions for the apparel and footwear industries.

Using aWorkbook, a sales representative can pick and choose from Icebreaker's entire product line, to create a dynamic digital catalogue assortment for a customer.

“We were labouring away with PowerPoint slides of our products and it worked but it wasn’t at all dynamic and if you got feedback from the customer it wasn't easy to go back and change what you had done," says Sarah Sherriff, strategic projects director for Icebreaker. "It took our account managers hours to do this for each sell-in presentation. It was a major time sink at certain critical points in the year,”

She says the company bought the app following a review of a range of options some of which would have cost $400,000 to $4 million over three years.

“We didn’t want any barriers to adoption,” Sheriff says, noting that the company is installing both an ERP and PLM system in another part of the business.

Icebreaker says it rolled out aWorkbook across its entire product line of over 900 products style colours, using it in each market worldwide. “Working with Hark Solutions we were able to easily get our data into the system using XML and familiar [tools]," says Sherriff.

“Using aWorkbook, our account managers can go to a customer, such as a ski store, and we can just show the customer the physical apparel assortment relevant to them along with the accompanying PDF rather than flipping through the whole catalogue," she says.