Coach Sid Meadows: Welcome to this week's episode of the Trend Report. I'm glad you're joining us today for what I know is going to be a really fascinating and informative conversation with my guests. But before we dive into that, I want to just take just a quick minute and ask you to head over to Apple and iTunes, if you haven’t already, to leave us a rating and a review. It really helps our show get discovered. 

With that, let's welcome today's guest Karli Slocum. Hey Carly, how are you?

Karli Slocum: Hi, Sid I'm good. How are you?

Sid: I'm doing great, and I'm really excited about this conversation because I love talking to people that are blazing a new trail doing new things and really showing our industry what's possible with tools and technology. You are doing that! I would love it if you take a moment and tell us who you are, what you do, and where you work.

Karli: I am Karli Slocum. I am now VP of Product and Marketing [at 3form]. The “product” portion is fairly new to my title. My background is in B2B marketing. I have focused most of that time since I graduated college really on bringing more of that digital technologies into B2B world. I truly believe we can be more B2C and learn a lot from how those organizations work with their customers and make it easier on our end for people to do business with us.

Sid: Okay, that's all great, but you know what you forgot? You forgot to tell us the name of your company… 

Karli: Oh, sorry! I'm the Vice President of Product and Marketing at 3form. 

Sid: You're our second guest from 3form—Jennifer Rocco was on with us. She's the Vice President of Sales. It was probably back in 2021, I honestly should have looked up the actual episode. 

Glad to have you here, again, I think you're gonna bring a perspective and share information with us about something you guys are working on that I think is really cool. But before we dive into that, tell us a little bit about your background. You said you'd worked in different B2B industries, and this is your first, if I remember correctly, entry into the furniture world.

Karli: Yeah—but I have to say it's been my favorite so far, and you'll see why in a minute. 

So I started at an HR tech, is what they call it now. It was really like a job board. It was careerbuilder.com, and they we really were pushing ahead. Facebook had just become a thing; social media was new. 

We were pretty cutting edge, even at the time of using social media, figuring out how to leverage it, especially as it evolved. Brands could get on board figuring out how to target people and use social media to connect, especially in the world of jobs. 

And then I moved into biotech. There it was really interesting, because not only is it B2B, but it was in the medical industry, which really hadn't leveraged many digital platforms—there were a lot of it out of security concerns, privacy concerns. So there was a lot of really interesting learnings I had there, in trying to push us forward to becoming more tech savvy. We began to use digital opportunities to connect with patients, have doctors connect with patients. Then I came over to 3form about 3 ½ years ago, and a lot of why they asked me to come on board was because of this background in digital connections. Trying to push forward and think differently about how we connect with our customers and their end users and what that might do for our business.

Sid: So I appreciate that. I'm always interested to learn how people got into our industry, and I know my listeners will agree that we're really glad you're hanging out with us. 

I’m so glad that it's your favorite industry by far, because most of us come in and get into the industry, and we never leave. That's because it is a really fun place to work!

One of the things I enjoy most about it is how it's evolving. Over the last 3-5 years, I think our industry is really taking big steps forward. Now, we're being pushed a little bit with some transitions or transformations as we might talk about them. But “digital” is something that we are paying attention to, but I don't know if we're paying attention to it enough. 

So I would really welcome your thoughts about why having a digital strategy is important to a business, whether it's a manufacturer, a dealer, or an independent rep. Why do you think that having that strategy is important? 

Karli: I think this goes back to the beginning of my career. It's about going where people live, work, and play—that’s what we had always said, for many years, and that just evolves. 

In 2005, it was all social media, and that's where you interact with people—but that continues to evolve. What platforms are your customers at? What platforms can you use to really connect with them on? Are there different ways that you connect with different types of people on those platforms? 

Because you're obviously going to interact with somebody differently on LinkedIn, versus another social media platform like Instagram. What you're doing with your website and SEO serves a different audience, as well. Those are all sort of basic components of what we've been using tool-wise for marketing for a long time. 

I'm more excited about how a lot of this sets the stage for the future. What [digital strategy] may look like in the years to come, where you can actually connect with people differently, and it's even more engaging. 

It's a little bit one-way sometimes. Even though we have more connectivity, it's not necessarily one-on-one, personalized journey with your company for each person. A lot of the technology and a lot of the digital approaches are laying the foundation for some really cool things that could happen in the future—a lot of it's not defined yet. 

It's hard to even define what the metaverses are—but I think the more that you dabble in trying to build different ways to engage with your customers, the more setup you will be to embrace those technologies and figure out how do you utilize them for your brand.

Sid: Absolutely, and I think that's a key point. What makes sense for your brand? You touched on the metaverse and web three (and that's like a whole other rabbit hole that we could go down and talk for hours about what's possible). But I want to go back for a second… 

And I think what you highlighted about digital strategies is that it started out as social media. That was the original digital strategy. 

How do we use Facebook? Then Instagram and then LinkedIn. I think then you added websites and having a digital strategy today is about a lot more than just social media or just having a website. 

This is a digital strategy. Being on a podcast, hosting a podcast, being a guest on a podcast—all of that is part of a digital strategy. It's not an in-person event, right? You listen on a phone or on a device or on a website. So digital strategies are bigger than what most people immediately go to (which is social media).

Karli: Yeah, the early days yeah, in the early days it was some basic website optimization, social media, email marketing, and then retargeting. But it's evolved into where you have these really great platforms for video or for audio. At what point will all these really cool technologies converge? They can bring together these different environments, different companies, different brands, different people to utilize and connect with similar audiences.

Sid: Well, and you just talked about one of my favorites—which is video. I think as an industry, it's something we have not really embraced. I'm not talking about long-form video that's got a pre roll and then an endcap. That’s all professionally done. 

What I'm really talking about is that short-form video in the vertical format now, almost on any platform. People consume short, less-than-one-minute content. 

And I know my listeners are thinking… “Oh, that can be really hard.” It’s actually really easy. It's challenging, but it also can be a lot of fun and drive a tremendous amount of engagement, if we leaned into video in a way that brought people into the world of furniture that we live in every day.

Karli: Yeah, I totally agree. I think video is something that we've used for quite a while, but it's evolved. So, we used to do these beautiful product videos, and we still do. But I would say that really where we get the most views are on things like tiktok and Instagram Reels. 

What's been really fun about those platforms is that I think you can bring your personality and your culture across so much better than these super produced videos. They were beautiful, but you didn't really feel necessarily connected to the environment where that product was created. 

We just dove in! We've done a lot of Tiktoks. It's hit or miss on whether they get many views, but I do think it shows our personality, and we have been able to have a lot of fun. 3form culture lends us to just experimentation and innovation—being willing to throw something out there. That means not always being like, “Well, is this specific to our brand and showcasing different people and different parts of our company?” Or is it just being fun?

Sid: You hit on something just then—experiment. Don't be afraid to experiment with what it is you're trying to do. Maybe you don't get a viral video (not that any of us would). Maybe you only get 50 people that engage in the video, but half of them—25 of the 50— engage in the video. 

They’re specifiers or they work with your ideal customer, and all of a sudden, they’ve reached out to you, because they saw this funny video that gave them a glimpse of who you are as a company and your culture. They're like, “hey, I really want to engage with you. This is a fun group, this is a dynamic group, let me reach out or let me go do more research”.

So don't be afraid to experiment with what works. It's okay to step outside that proverbial box and try something new and different.

Karli: Totally, and I think if you don't, you're gonna get left behind. 

How quickly content fades—you can post a tweet, and it's gone in two seconds, right? You can post a Tiktok and nobody really sees it, but it allows you to play around with the platform and allows you to understand how to use it. So as those platforms evolve and new ones come in, you have a much better grasp on how to use them, and how you might be able to leverage them for your brand, versus never touching them. So I think that's hugely important. We're doing that in a number of different ways. Like we just built our first virtual showroom.

Sid: I'm gonna stop you there, because I want to jump into that quickly actually. What we talked about previously, was that you guys have been on this “digital journey.” You really have been trying to figure out ways to connect with customers that are maybe a little bit different. 

What was the first decision that you made [towards your digital strategy]? What prompted the virtual showroom?

Karli: We participate in UConn in Wicd by design, like a number of shows. And I think one of the things that we had to grapple with is, we're a fairly well known brand—then on the flip side, we're a small manufacturer. We don't have the type of dollars to spend like a large furniture company. 

If we think about our business, and what we do, or all these materials, and the hard part is, you can do anything with our materials. Which is great, but on the flip side, it becomes difficult to translate that to a customer who seems almost mind-blown with all the things you could do. 

So when we were faced with whether we renew our lease at NeoCon, or do we go in a different direction where we invest in a virtual showroom and then we also invest in more personal visits by our customers to our Salt Lake City facility? We really had to weigh it out, and it was a difficult decision. Quite frankly, I'd love to be involved in NeoCon moving forward at some level, right. Regardless of whether we have a huge showroom or not, I think there's a lot of value to that. 

When we had to weigh our options, we decided to roll the dice and build this virtual showroom. At the same time, we paired that with bringing customers to our headquarters, and I think the value of those two married together is really important. The virtual showroom allows us to quickly change out all of our designs and colors and materials, and show them at scale and show them in an abstract way, but also in a very realistic, beautiful boutique hotel. Then on the flip side, having our customers visit us here—they can see that everything we do is by-hand, every sheet we lay up in our factory is done meticulously by hand, and made to order. So you don't really grasp that when you're at a trade show. But pairing those two together really allows you to experience the breadth of our materials, then visit us and see kind of the unique bespoke aspect of our materials, as well.

Sid: Two things that I picked up here in that, and thank you for that explanation. A tradeshow, whether it's NeoCon, or a regional tradeshow, or ICF in New York or healthcare design, whatever it might be—tradeshows only give you the opportunity to show a small sampling of your product in a very specific way. In your case, it's samples or 3-by-3 squares or chips for a furniture manufacturer—and maybe that’s only one piece of 100 different pieces that they have. That was one aspect of it, the expense associated with it. 

So look, I love the account. So we will pick on the account for just a moment. It's a 2-day event, and so you get a very small window of time to actually introduce people to your product—if they come to your floor, if they were intentional about it, or they see you and they want to stop by right. It's limited. 

We're leaning into a digital strategy now. In this case, with a virtual showroom, it became unlimited, where anybody could visit any time of the day 24/7. Literally anyone from around the world not only can see small samples, they actually get to see real-life installations. 

So that they can see what the pattern of the leaf looks like on the full four-by-eight sheet of paper married side-by-side. Specifics. 

So now all of a sudden, they have a better experience, which was really the thing I was after what you've done, is focused on creating a dynamic customer experience that helps the customer build your brand, and also helps grow your revenue.

Karli: That's right I think you have to go back to ask, what are you selling? What are you producing? Furniture manufacturers may always need to have some place where somebody feels and sits down on their furniture. 

For us, you don't sit on our materials. They’re partitions, they’re art pieces, they’re tabletops. So really what we try to communicate is—how does this color or this design interact with light? How is it going to create a space that allows the light in but enhances the surroundings? That makes people want to be there? That is something you can accomplish in a virtual world. Maybe other brands are going to grapple with that, because people are gonna want to touch and feel it a little bit more—and their customers can't get that out of a sample. 

Sid: What was the process here? How long did it take you to create the virtual showroom? Describe it just a little bit! 

I think you've given us a little bit of a glimpse (I have an advantage over our listeners that I've actually seen it). We will put in the links in the show notes, a link to go out there and check it out. Everybody can see it. But talk to us a minute about that journey. How long did it take you once you said “this is what we're going to do” to get it up and going?

Karli: First we had to figure out what is the concept? We had two really big opportunities that we wanted to pursue. So one was how do we educate our end users on the different types of materials we have because we have Veria, which is perfect for partitions; Chroma for tabletops, glass; so on and so on. 

We decided to create this hub, kind of a museum of materials. It's there that you can walk through this museum and see things that are heat form, see colors, see how light is transmitting through those panels. But I think even more importantly was the other experience, which is you can go to right now we have a healthcare building that's live. We are working on our hospitality building. So we call it a campus so you start in this hub, where you learn and understand the material but you can quickly navigate over to a health care building that shows exactly how designers specify our materials today. Reception desks to protect what your partitions blocking off waiting rooms, head walls, all these different ways that our products are commonly used. The idea being there is a designer doesn’t have a lot of time, right? Everybody's crunched for time. So they can hop over there and see how this is done in this reception desk. Click over here, and this is all I need to specify. 

It makes it super easy to go down that journey. In the future, I just wanted to give them exactly what files they need to pop in their own panel, so they could download that and put it into Revit or CAD and be able to go from there. We just wanted to be really realistic, and so we built out healthcare, we've got hospitality space coming in the next two months—we're gonna do education, corporate, a number of the typical vertical markets that we are in.

Sid: You took the approach of “Let's educate the community, the consumer, an end user, a designer, an architect, or an office furniture dealer, that wanted to use your product.” 

So you took the opportunity to educate them, and then you start showing them real life examples in a digital format, that have light coming in different ways you can add. You can do different lighting in the ceiling to see what it looks like our Flex, and you're also showing applications, now real life, or maybe they had not thought about using one of your products on a head wall, or maybe they hadn't thought about putting it on a desktop or whatever the case may be. 

Now you're showing that to them, which spawns ideas and creativity by your ideal customers, which is fantastic. You're building out more and more and more of these, so I really love the approach. You've also made it easy for them to order a sample, right? If they see something they like, while they're there, they can quickly go and do it. Correct?

Karli: That's right, yeah. You can land on something, and if it's within a product (hardware or material) you can click on it, go right to the material and just order samples off our website. They're free, of course, raw material bank—so you can go there, but the virtual showroom takes you right to our website to order free samples. You can click on it, and go to the product page where it's the whole solution. Sure, you can just download the Revit files and then go from there and start designing out your space. 

Sid: That's a very easy customer experience. They don't have to stop and try to chat with you, if you guys have a chat bot on your website, I don't know if you do or not, or have to try to call you or reach out to their sales rep. They can do everything right there. I think for me, what's important is that they can do it at their own pace—when they want to, at their own time.

Maybe they're doing it during the workday, maybe they're not. Maybe they fed their family, put their kids to bed, or whatever the case may be—and they decide, let me go and look at this, let me pick out some finishes. They can do it at 10 o'clock at night if they want to. We know the world that digital people work around the clock doing a variety of different things. So now it's open to everybody versus a two and a half for a three day event where you can only see a limited, limited example.

Karli: I've been building digital journeys, basically my whole life. Regardless of whether it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago, one of the things you always designed for were the different types of people that you work with, and our reps are fantastic. Our reps are what makes 3form go round. 

I think where we have to figure out is—when do they want to interact with a rep, if at all, they may call a rep right out the gate. But we can also take them down this digital journey and get them pretty close to where they want to be and engage a rep when they're ready to. 

So they may get all the way through the process and not need a rep at all, or they may get to a certain point just want to make sure they’re getting the right gauge or finish. The important part of the digital journey is making sure that people can enter and exit and ways that they want to work with you and make it frictionless.

Sid: Those are such great points, especially the last one—make it frictionless. I love what you're doing, and there are a lot of people that are engaging with you. But can you tell us a little bit about what the impact has been so far? What kind of results are you seeing since you made this change?

Karli: I think some of the biggest results is that we can pair this with our launches. We can give this as an additional tool. 

So we just had a big color launch, and it's our new toy—23 colors of the year. The great part is that it's another asset where we can update the showroom to show the new colors. Then when we talk about our color collection, we show it through samples, we show it through photography, and then it's like, “hey, go check it out in the virtual showroom and see what it looks like in these different solutions.” And then you know, go get your free samples. 

That one, it's already had a good impact today. But I'm kind of more excited about what we're going to do in the future. 

We're also building tools on our website to quickly visualize our 750 patterns within our different hardware systems. Again, it's about seeing scale. Translucency. Showrooms today are still sort of static—you go in there, you design out a space, and then, you know, you can kind of change it up. 

But you can't today, have a consumer go in and say, “Well, I want to design this room.” It doesn't work that way yet. Right. So we're pairing that with more of a design tools that have been available in B2C environments for a while. We're actually using the same software as Crate and Barrel is, so the idea being that you don't even have to leave our website—you can go find a pattern that color you really love, see it in a hardware solution, and see what color of finished hardware finish you want. Then download everything you need and go from there. Again, only really need to interact with a rep if you really have additional questions. 

I think the biggest barrier I'm trying to break is that we have a perception that we're all custom. With that comes an idea that we're very expensive, and that we have these long turnaround times. The reality is, we have these really great standard products that fit in solutions that fit a lot of applications.I want people to be able to experience that without the friction of having to pick up the phone to call a rep. 

You can completely customize your own design. They can start with what we've got, and then go from there. 

Sid: You have two buttons, right? First button says “See our quick ship program.” Second button, “See our custom program.” And they can choose whichever one they want to?

Karli: That's exactly where we're going,.

Sid: I love that, because some people need it quickly, right? Some people are willing to wait. 

But again, I think you're meeting the customer where they are, you're giving them the tools that they need. You're debunking the myth that we're expensive and long lead-time by showing them, “ey, we do have in-stock quick ship products that ship really fast. But we also have our longer lead time product.” So you're showing them again, educating them, and allowing them to do it on their own pay at their own pace at their own time. 

The other thing you've said a couple of times that I really, really appreciate, is—removing the friction from the process. There's a lot of friction in our industry, there's a lot of back and forth. Now you're giving the specifier, the dealer, the end user that control to say, “Because you're giving me everything here, I will reach out to you when we need to reach out to you if we are needing additional information or samples or whatever else.”

Karli: Yeah, and I think that the other key part of this is pricing.

Sid: Are you putting pricing on your website? 

Karli: Yes, actually—we sell panel by panel.