ExchangeFrame Unveils Revolutionary Retail Technology at Trafik Tradeshow on August 13th

(Miami, FL) – With a click of a mouse, this season’s retail orders will be placed before anyone enters onto the tradeshow floor. With a pure vision to create a seamless retail sales environment Matt Odom, CEO of ExchangeFrame, and Dan Caplin, COO of Trafik Tradeshow, have created the first ever virtual apparel tradeshow event set to go live with over 300 of the world’s best fashion designers on August 13th 2007. The Trafik Tradeshow is held in South Beach, Miami from August 15th through August 17th, 2007.

Fashion retailers and buyers have been slow to embrace technology for fear of losing that “personal touch” that links the buyer to the brand. However, with the retail industry growing at rates too fast for pen and paper and technology advancing at lighting speed, it only makes sense to evolve.

Trafik Tradeshow, a retail market specific show that is already an innovative concept in its own right, refuses to fall behind and get lost in the conventional chaos trade shows can create. Acknowledging the tremendous potential of online opportunities, Trafik Tradeshow is offering the first online platform and free WiFi for designers, buyers, and sales teams to communicate and share information like never before on the ExchangeFrame system.

ExchangeFrame allows the brand, retail buyer, showroom, and tradeshow to do what they do best. The virtual showroom will not replace the actual trade show, but rather enhance it and make the whole experience more organized, productive and enjoyable for all involved. Brands and sales showrooms can showcase and sell their collections more effectively. Retailers can plan, browse and order items more efficiently. Tradeshows can manage registrations and interact with all attendees more quickly. It’s a win-win for everyone.

No longer will brands have to pour time and money into trying to generate the same old noisy buzz in order to draw attention to their booth. Brands will be able to display their products online pre-show and allocate their time and money more efficiently. Research shows that companies who leverage an online sales channel with their buyers should see a spike in sales on the order of 10% to 20%. ExchangeFrame provides that online sales channel to all Trafik exhibitors.

The sales boost is a reflection of smarter shopping. Using ExchangeFrame, retail buyers are able to set “open to buy” budgets that will monitor spending and freely explore a network of designers and showrooms in a safe and efficient online environment. Buyers can search on the most granular level for specific styles, prices and date availability. Three days prior to the convention, buyers can put their orders in and then confirm their impeccable taste when they arrive at the booth, all without ever physically touching a purchase order form.

Beyond displaying and processing orders virtually, Trafik will use ExchangeFrame for buyer registration and exhibitor processing as well. Dan Caplin, Director of Operations for Trafik Tradeshow, claims that ExchangeFrame’s web services “improved our internal efficiencies by 60% at our January show” and expects even more impressive numbers for the upcoming show in August.

In expressing his enthusiasm to improve not only Trafik, but also the fashion community’s future success in the age of technology, James Costa says it best in stating, “ExchangeFrame is a tool that all tradeshows, retailers, brands and showrooms should use. It’s an incredible resource and we look forward to working with ExchangeFrame on all future shows! We are freeing up valuable time for out show attendees, allowing them to take a moment to enjoy Miami’s spectacular ocean view.”

Trafik Tradeshow and ExchangeFrame are setting out to revolutionize the way the fashion community does business, by creating a more harmonious and efficient work environment for the retail industry’s pros. To make this digitized process more comfortable for Trafik Tradeshow attendees, this service will be offered at no extra fee, and online tutorials will be available on www.Exchangeframe.com and www.YouTube.com.

ExchangeFrame is a joint venture between Predictix and some of the principal founders of Trafik tradeshow. A hybrid of some of the brightest minds in retail software and experts from the apparel industry have come together and created a cutting edge, web based wholesale order management system for designers, retailers, showrooms and buyers. (www.exchangeframe.com)

Trafik Tradeshow is the South East’s independent contemporary fashion tradeshow and is inspired by the evolution of the boutique shopping experience throughout the region. The show was created to fully service the market, while creating a comfortable environment that boasts beauty, ease of use, and tremendous retail sales opportunities. (www.trafiktradeshow.com)

Predictix has over 100 work years of experience integrating the most complex supply chain, inventory management, planning, forecasting, assortment and merchandising systems on the planet. Some of their clients include Office Depot and Perry Ellis. (www.predictix.com)

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We get this question a lot. As a general philosophy, we believe that it matters less about who we are, and more about the value of the solutions we provide to you, our customers. Nonetheless, it’s still a fair question and we have a great story to tell, so here you go.

ExchangeFrame is a joint venture between Predictix (www.predictix.com) and some of the principal founders of Trafik tradeshow (www.trafiktradeshow.com ), where Predictix is the majority partner in the JV. Our team is a hybrid of some of the brightest minds in retail software and experts from the apparel industry.

Predictix is a fast growing specialty consulting and software company that solves challenging retail science problems for the most elite retailers in the world. With consultants and engineers based in the US and UK, they have worked with retailers on 4 continents, including major grocery retailers, fashion retailers, electronics retailers and more. Collectively, Predictix has over 100 work years of experience integrating the most complex supply chain, inventory management, planning, forecasting, assortment and merchandising systems on the planet. Some of the names on their client list include Office Depot, Best Buy, Kroger, Walgreens, Oracle, Michaels, Hugo Boss, Perry Ellis and more.

The Predictix core of scientists and engineers includes world class talent and some of the very brightest minds in retail software. In fact, many of the engineers on staff were instrumental in designing a significant portion of the Retek Predictive Analytic Stack which was bought by Oracle Retail in 2005 for $630M.

In 2005, Dan Caplin (a co-founder of Trafik Tradeshow) and I were having dinner and trading stories about our respective businesses (at the time, I was working for as a manager at Accenture, on assignment at the Retek Solution Center). Dan said that in hosting tradeshows for the apparel industry, he observed that the nature of the apparel industry was (and still is) largely paper based, from the paper line sheets to the actual order form. Certainly there was an opportunity to help his customers do business better.

Why not digitize the whole interaction and transaction and in doing so, help all players operate more efficiently, create a common platform for all, and ultimately promote more profitable business across the greater apparel industry? While Dan and his colleagues at Trafik had plenty of industry knowledge, could supply subject matter expertise, and provide access to potential users, they simply didn’t have the experience building retail technology platforms.

Enter Predictix. In early 2006, after leaving Accenture / Oracle Retail, I joined Predictix as Director of Operations. Predictix was growing fast and interested in solving interesting retail problems, so I took the idea for ExchangeFrame to Molham Aref, one of the co-founders of Predictix, and an idea started to take shape quickly. After a number of dinner meetings, mad scribbling on napkins, and laying out a business plan – ExchangeFrame was born. Together, the team of veteran retail software experts at Predictix and the contemporary fashion industry experts from Trafik would take ExchangeFrame from being an idea on a napkin to a fully formed company and software service with an immediate goal:

Provide a collaborative, web-based wholesale ordering platform to the boutique and midsized retail community, including retailers, brands, showrooms and tradeshows.

To read more about the birth and launch of ExchangeFrame, you can read a blog entry I wrote on my personal blog called “The 300 Day Gestation of ExchangeFrame”.

After many focus groups with our users, and constant requests for a platform that supports a bar code solution, we are pleased to announce integrated bar code scanning! Not only does our bar code scanning technology let Brands and Showrooms scan bar code tags directly into our ordering interface, we also generate the actual bar codes in various catalog and label formats for you! Our integrated bar code scanning solution is highly portable, simple and easy to use!

What do you need to use bar code scanning?

1. An ExchangeFrame Brand or Showroom user account that has been upgraded to Silver or Platinum level.
2. A PC, Notebook (Windows or Mac) that is equipped with Bluetooth. If you don’t have Bluetooth, a simple $20 Bluetooth USB adapter will do the trick.*
3. A bar code scanner. There are hundreds of bar code scanners on the market. We have tested and recommend the Flic Scanner by Microvision. It’s lightweight, available in Bluetooth enabled models, and is inexpensive (approx. $250). For preferred pricing on scanners, please contact sales@exchangeframe.com today!

Bar code scanning used at a trade show, showroom or on the road during a sales call gives your sales team a competitive edge! Your sales reps can more quickly scan the items, color styles, and size options that most interest your buyers. Better yet, give the scanner to your buyer and let them browse and scan items at their own pace until they are ready to finalize their order quantities! Ultimately, you’ll spend less time writing the order and more time interacting and listening to your buyer!

What else is on the horizon?

Within the next 30 t0 60 days, ExchangeFrame will also be releasing a mobile version of our Courtesy Order web application. This mobile application will allow owners of PDA style bar code scanners to not only scan bar codes, but actually finalize the order in their hand held device. More to come on this exciting technology!

ExchangeFrame remains committed to providing our customers with the very best in affordable, web based wholesale order management solutions. We streamline the order process for buyers and sellers, provide all users with web based access to orders, item collections, collaborative messaging, trade show registration, marketing pages, and planning and analysis tools. If you don’t have an an ExchangeFrame account already, sign up today!

* - In some of our tests on Dell laptops, the internal Bluetooth technology stack was not compatible with the Flic Scanner. However, a $20 Bluetooth USB adapter fixed the problem just fine.

We see a LOT of line sheets come through our offices. In most cases, we are helping brands quickly get product information onto ExchangeFrame before the start of a show. We’ve seen low budget black and white printouts to high gloss, fashion magazine quality product catalogs. However, the majority of line sheets we see come from the low budget end of the spectrum and this article is written for that audience.

Surprisingly, we see a lot product photographs are of poor quality, poor resolution, or where the photo just doesn’t do the item justice. We’ve asked the brand designers / owners about this and we hear two types of answers. Either they want nice studio quality shots, but don’t have the time to find a studio, negotiate a deal, etc… or, they want to do the work themselves but don’t trust their ability with photo editing software to take a good photograph and make it ‘web ready’.

For those who want studio quality photography, we’ll be setting up partnerships with photo studios in both NYC and LA to help you get your collections shot digitally and optimized for presentation on ExchangeFrame.

For those more interested in a DIY approach, read on!

We chose to integrate ExchangeFrame with Snipshot.com primarily because their photo editing interface was intuitive and easy to use. Our users can access Snipshot.com directly from their accounts and use this service to crop photos, resize photos, enhance photos, adjust the brightness, contrast, hue, and more!

I’ve put together a little tutorial to show you the power of Snipshot.com in action!

STEP ONE: TAKE SOME CRAPPY PRODUCT SHOTS

Ok, this is by far the easiest part of the tutorial and the most easily reproduced I’m sure! I PURPOSEFULLY took some really poor shots to make my point. If I were taking this shot for real, I would have spent some time finding better light, asked someone to model for me, etc.

I grabbed a favorite blazer of mine that I bought in London that has some of the old Ramones art work screened on the front and back. Then, I threw up a white sheet as my back drop, put my camera on a tripod, put it on a timer, and stood in front of the sheet for a few shots. As you can see, my hurried approach resulted in some pretty poor shots of the Ramones Jacket. These were all shot at 600 px wide and 800 px long.

STEP TWO: UPLOAD PHOTOS TO EXCHANGEFRAME

This is also an easy step. To upload your photos:

• Log In (this applies to brand users only)

• Click on CATALOG, then click on “The Image Tool Box”

• You can either upload all the images together in a .zip file, or upload them one by one.

When you are done, you should see something like this.

STEP THREE: EDIT THE OFFENDING IMAGE WITH SNIPSHOT.COM

Clicking on the ‘Edit Image with Snipshot’ link will actually send the image stored on ExchangeFrame to Snipshot.com for editing. It may take a few moments, but you should soon see your image in the Snipshot.com window.

Once your image is uploaded, you can begin to edit the image. In this case I first clicked on ‘Enhance’ which brightened the image considerably. Then I cropped and resized the image so that is was 300 x 300, the optimal size for item images on ExchangeFrame. The resulting image looks like this.

Once I’ve finished working with the image, I click on the ‘Continue’ button and this will send the edited image back to ExchangeFrame! I repeat the process several times for each image until I finished working with each one. The resulting images are far better than my hurried, crappy originals!

STEP FOUR – ASSIGN IMAGES TO ITEM RECORD

Once my images are ready, I can assign them to an item record. To round this tutorial, I created a record for this jacket on a demo account, and then assigned this item to my collection on display at a demo tradeshow. A buyer browsing my online collection would see this.

ExchangeFrame has a new strategic partner in pureIMAGES, a NYC based photography service. pureIMAGES has received training on ExchangeFrame related image requirements and is prepare to not only to service your standard photography needs, but also provide you with ‘ExchangeFrame ready’ images!

Not only will pureIMAGES meet all your photography needs, you will feel extra special knowing that 5% of their contracted rate is donated to the charity of your choice! So as your pureIMAGES are being created to express the artfullness of your line, your generosity and contribution to society will be felt as well!

Check out pureIMAGES soon!

A paper line sheet or catalog is a dead document. Once you put it out there, you can’t take it back and change it. Try this: Go to any Kinko’s close to a major tradeshow the night before opening day. I’ll bet it’s slammed full of show exhibitors working late into the night to make corrections to line sheets, re-print them, etc. so that the information will be current for the opening day that the show. Why? Because line sheets are dead documents that can’t be updated without reprinting them.

Next, consider the wastefulness of line sheets.

If you’ve been to Magic, Project, FAME, etc. you know what I’m talking about. The volume of paper wasted giving out printed line sheets, catalogs, and order forms to buyers who may not ever look at them again is staggering! The wasted paper alone is cause to look for a better, smarter alternative. Consider the labor and money spent creating line sheets, printing line sheets, shipping and direct mailing line sheets – this expense to a company, especially a small emerging company, is staggering.

Unfortunately, brands have had few options to paper for marketing purposes. A brand could invest tens of thousands of dollars on expensive enterprise software that offered some sort of online catalog option. Other forward thinking brands have hired savvy web developers to create custom, password protected web sites that provide current wholesale product information, and in some cases go as far as processing actual orders. This option is still cost prohibitive for smaller emerging product brands.

That day has passed. ExchangeFrame provides the smallest of product brands with a super affordable web based platform that kills the notion of needing to print paper line sheets.

ExchangeFrame provides secure, robust, online digital collections, with dynamic data, and as many images you like! Your buyers can see the latest, most up-to-date information on any given product. Add or remove items from Item Collections. Update delivery information. Associate shipping records for orders.

We understand that sometimes paper makes sense. Using ExchangeFrame makes printing a line sheet a choice, rather than a requirement. Plus, at the click of a button, ExchangeFrame generates the line sheet for you as a PDF, which is easily emailed to your buyer.

For ExchangeFrame powered brands, going digital is an easy, easy thing.

Step 1: Get your collateral together.

You will need the following information handy, for every item in your collection: Item Name, Item Code, Description, Wholesale Price, MSRP, Ship Date, MOQ, Size Availability, and product shots / images. I’d also recommend having a photo or color swatch of each product’s available color styles.

Having good product shots is a really a must. With the low cost of a decent point and shoot digital camera, and the advent of online services that let you do basic photo processing tasks ( I.e. http://www.snipshot.com), there is no reason even the smallest of brands can have amazing photos for each piece they sell.

I’ll write another piece dedicated on doing DIY product shots.

Step 2: Create Item Records

Item records in ExchangeFrame are “living” records, meaning that they can be updated as often as necessary, with all those changes being propagated across ExchangeFrame.

Creating item records with ExchangeFrame is simple. And once you’ve learned how to user our cloning tool, you can create groups of like item records in minutes. Our batch editing tool also allows you to upload lots of images at once, and then drag and drop those images onto the items they belong to, rather than having to upload each image one by one. We think this feature is reeaaally cool, if we say so ourselves… You should give it a try!

Step 3: Assign Items to Item Collections

Ok, so you’ve created 500 item records. ExchangeFrame lets you create as many Item Collections as you like. For example, you may want to put the same item in three different collections: “2007 Footwear Collection”, “Items with a July 1 Ship Date”, and “2007 Hemp Collection”.

Once your collections are created, you can assign any combination of collections to your company’s private online showroom (we call this a Peep Show) or to any event that has a virtual ExchangeFrame version of the show (like Trafik Tradeshow, or UNITED). Your buyers will be able to filter your entire product catalog by any collection that you’ve created, making Item Collection really powerful grouping tools.

Step 4: Optional. Generate a line sheet with the click of a button.

The icing on the cake is that any Item Collection can be turned into a line sheet, so you can send your customer product information on just those collections they are interested in!

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Step away from the line sheet and into the age of digital collections. You’ll save time, money, reach more customers more effectively, and in steering your buyers to online collections, you’ll open the door to taking more orders online and increasing your revenue.

Try it. You might like it.

The ExchangeFrame team wanted a distinct venue where we can post entries about everything from product features to opinions to technology to the cool industry event we went to last night!

Since ExchangeFrame launched at Trafik Tradeshow in January 2007, we have already been through two more releases (we are now at ExchangeFrame 1.3) and are adding new customers every day. We continue to learn valuable lessons from the industry partners around us, from our vocal customers, and from interacting with the many different players in the boutique retail industry - retailers, brands, showrooms, and tradeshows.

Please check back here on a regular basis to find out more about what’s going on with the ExchangeFrame team!