Small beginnings, unique solutions
Texas-based lighting company, Modern Lantern, has been helping homeowners, hotels, event planners, offices, and anyone else trying to light up a room “cut the cord” for almost five years now. Stephen, a former product designer for Pier One Imports, and Carrie, an interior designer, built and patented their first cordless lamp five years ago that has since grown into an incredible collection loved by designers and homeowners around the world.
Their business quickly grew beyond just the two of them hand assembling the first few lamps. They now have a global list of suppliers and clients, warehouses, and a growing team of remote employees to coordinate work with.
Project Management and Multi-Department Organization
Hibox gives Modern Lantern the ability to manage new product creation, sales, manufacturing, and marketing productively while on the move. The team has seen 95% decrease in productivity-hindering email. Additionally, another 50% decrease in the time it takes to complete tasks and respond to important clients.
Before moving to Hibox, Stephen and Carrie were using a combination of email, texts, Skype, Google Docs, and Trello to collaborate. Hibox allows them to replace these 5+ tools with one unified collaboration platform. This saves a lot of time switching between apps and managing different accounts. It’s much easier to get employees on board as well.
Modern Lantern organizes their team into “streams” for different projects and company departments. These streams are collaborative spaces with all relevant project members, chat, documents, tasks and video calls. Conversation is focused, relevant, and productive.
Carrie and Stephen use different streams for each project and business activity. Outdoor Collection, Spring Looks, Blog Collaboration, Social Media Management, etc. Each stream has a separate task lists so what needs to be completed for each project is trackable and organized.
Managing clients is even easier
Most of all, Carrie and Stephen love the “External User” feature that allows manufacturers, suppliers, and clients to be added to the platform for better communication with the whole production chain. External users can chat and share information only in streams they are invited to. They cannot see any information or other users outside of their streams.
Also, the manufacturers can participate in the creative conversation and help make Carrie and Stephen’s designs reality without having access to confidential information. Suppliers can have a quick conversation with Carrie and Stephen for fast decisions instead of email or playing “phone tag”. Additionally, clients have a direct channel to their account managers with chat. They can use the integrated tasks to track progress without seeing other clients, suppliers, or private company information.
Improve productivity with organized chat and files
Additionally, private streams save all conversations and documents shared so anything can be retrieved with a simple search. As a result, no information is lost in messy inboxes. In Hibox, everyone has immediate access to the latest versions of files. As a result, Hibox improves customer service and external communication, leading to faster new designs, happier clients, and most importantly, happier founders.
“Hibox has allowed us to scale our creativity. We can collaborate real-time with anyone, inside or outside our company to quickly bring our new designs and projects to life. Not only can we stay connected on-the-go, but with tasks we can turn conversation into actual productivity right away.” — Carrie Fitzwater, Modern Lantern
In conclusion, Hibox has given Modern Lantern the tools they need to increase productivity and will be crucial to helping them stay organized as their team grows in an increasingly competitive industry.
You can check out more on Modern Lantern here: http://www.modernlantern.com/
More on how your team can work better too here: Hibox.co
-The Hibox Team
