ORIS Intelligence Helps Manufacturers Ensure Brand Integrity and Margin
Today’s manufacturers distribute and sell product through diverse and frequently competing sales channels—from big box stores to specialty retailers, to online. That’s where Oris Intelligence can help optimize profitability and protect margin.
While these complex networks of channel relationships create highly desirable and flexible choices for consumers, they also present unique challenges to national and international manufacturers when it comes to ensuring the quality, integrity, and consistency of their brands.
Enter ORIS Intelligence, a Columbus-based startup determined to offer the best possible service to manufacturers, from large to small, that are seeking to protect their brands.
Today’s manufacturers recognize that to successfully scale their businesses, they must manage diverse channels with parity, serving both customers who want to buy at a store as well as those who prefer online. Manufacturers build partnerships with trusted sellers who add value, rather than unauthorized sellers who create instability for the brand by manipulating and undercutting pricing, threatening the brand with inconsistent pricing and reducing the margin available for all sellers to properly market the product.
ORIS Intelligence provides PROWL, a cloud-based solution complete with an intuitive interface and easy-to-use tools, that monitors the entire web, including comparison shopping sites and third party marketplaces like Amazon, eBay and Google Shopping.
PROWL reports back to the brand manufacturer all the authorized and unauthorized resellers that are selling their products and the price they are selling it for. This information equips the brand to enforce price policies and, with PROWL’s case management tools, capture all violations, correspondence, and proof for any given seller.
Most brand manufacturers have a pricing policy for authorized sellers known as MAP (minimum advertised price). With ORIS Intelligence, they now have the platform and tools to enforce their MAP policies. Increasingly, resellers will only market products from brand manufacturers that enforce MAP. Manufacturers know that enforcing price parity in their channels, allows retailers to be confident that the margin will be there so they can properly market the product and support the end consumer before, during, and after the sale.
“It’s much easier these days for unauthorized sellers to get a hold of products,” said Pamela Springer, President & CEO.
“Some authorized sellers will play games with pricing after 5 p.m. or on weekends when they don’t think anyone is watching. We find all the online sellers of our customers’ products, including marketplaces like eBay and Amazon. We monitor on a near real-time basis around the clock. A company can look in 24-hours-a-day. We also send a daily summary report of the latest pricing violations and corrections for our clients to be able to take action, she said.
Springer, founder and former CEO of Manta Media, is a veteran executive with more than 20 years’ experience growing technology-based companies. She exited after a successful private equity round at Manta, then climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, performed some consulting, and, last year, was brought in to commercialize PROWL, being the second associate at ORIS Intelligence.
“We’re building a team,” Springer said. “We’ve gone from six to 15 employees in a year and have about 375 brands we work with as customers.”
It’s straight forward for manufacturers to sample what ORIS Intelligence can do for their brands. They simply call 614.401.6310 to schedule an online demonstration. The next step is to provide a list of two or three products for PROWL to monitor for a few days.
Companies like Timbuk2 and InFocus have engaged ORIS Intelligence.
“The thing that has been really exciting for me,” Springer said, “are the referrals within the customer base to their peers. To be able to have other customers tell people in their vertical about what we can do, puts the wind at our back. I’ve never been in a business where customers do so much of the PR for us. It’s wonderful, the promotion and referrals that are starting to happen.”
Springer recommends Central Ohio as a good place to start a company.
“People here love to build things,” she said. You can find a talented team that has the values of wanting to build something together and either fund in a bootstrap manner, or now with R1 accessing seed capital is better now than ever, and institutional money is starting to draw more interest and venture firms. Mass attracts mass.”
