Surefront is a unified product collaboration platform to power growth and ROI for the retail industry. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Surefront Chief Solutions Officer Doug Heckmann to learn more about the Los Angeles based software company.
Doug Heckman’s Background
What is Doug Heckmann’s background? Heckmann said:
“I’ve been privileged to start working at Surefront 8 years ago. I have had a multi-faceted role, from leading product design and development efforts to sales, marketing, and custom success. Priorly, I worked with Surefront’s founder, Luke Wang, at an early-stage venture investment firm. I started my career as a co-founder and the head of sales at a regional consumer packaged goods company based in Pennsylvania.”
Formation Of Surefront
How did the idea for Surefront come together? Heckmann shared:
“Over many years working in the retail industry working with the merchandising teams at major retailers, we were troubled by a considerable lack of software solutions to facilitate buyers at retailers to collaborate with their counterparts at brands/suppliers on merchandising and product development. Even the largest retailers and suppliers in the U.S. were still emailing spreadsheets, powerpoints, and PDFs back and forth in the trillion dollar retail industry.”
“Ultimately, we were inspired by these challenges to build a Bloomberg Terminal-like platform and tools for retailers, brands, and manufacturers to streamline their information supply chain and more efficiently bring new products to market.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Heckmann’s favorite memory working for the company so far? Heckmann reflected:
“An early memory of a Surefront teammate working all through the night to churn out a demo video to be used in a morning meeting comes to mind. We’ve been highly selective in recruitment and were lucky to have a really wonderful team here from the very early days onward.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Heckmann explained:
“Surefront’s core product is an enterprise gateway marketplace platform that enables retailers to work collaboratively with their brand and supplier partners to design, develop, and buy products in bulk (wholesale) and then retail to end consumers. This platform represents the vanguard of a paradigm shift in enterprise software. In the past and even nowadays, software was primarily designed to automate internal workflows of an individual organization. Surefront is aimed to connect many organizations together as a network and automate both internal and external workflows.”
“Surefront offers three powerful and connected solutions to drive the retail industry: Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) to design and buy products, Product Information Management (PIM) to manage product lines, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to wholesale products.”
Evolution Of Surefront’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Heckmann noted:
“Surefront was unique in that we steadily built toward a methodical release of a comprehensive software solution. We were in no rush to get a beta product out just for the sake of having a feature to sell. Instead, we took our time building out a suite of cross-organization collaboration tools to provide a holistic suite of solutions that enable retailers, brands, and manufacturers to streamline their information supply chain from the product concepting phase all the way through wholesale transactions. The early days of the company were solely focused on design and engineering, whereas today Surefront is a software company with a full team of sales, marketing and customer success in addition to designers and engineers.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Heckmann about customer success stories, he cited:
“Surefront transitioned JIA HOME from a traditional home furnishing wholesaler to one of the most tech-advanced companies with the highest productivity in the market. Each employee is able to deliver multi-million dollars of sales on average. And all of that is being accomplished via a purely remote and digital work environment – no office and no paper. Product design and sales are fully streamlined by PLM + PIM + CRM seamlessly on one platform. Surefront has been a game-changer for JIA HOME.”
Funding
Upon asking Heckmann about the company’s funding information, he revealed:
“Surefront was courted by hundreds of VCs, but we decided to grow organically without taking external investment to date.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Heckmann affirmed:
“Surefront is the inventor of a portfolio of several major patents to define how organizations with complex hierarchies are connected together as a network where users can collaborate and communicate with internal and external teams by streamlined workflows. We combine three next-gen technological innovations into one unified solution, replacing ad hoc tools, PDFs and spreadsheets that make up the traditional retail technology toolkit. Surefront’s substantial features represent a generational leap forward for retailers, manufacturers and the brands within their respective ecosystems, allowing companies to level up and align supplier management to better meet their true needs.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Heckmann pointed out:
“We’re laser-focused on building upon our successes and tying Surefront directly into connected enterprise systems, such as SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle. At the same time, we’re always working to actually make Surefront smaller so each feature can be used independently of others.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Heckmann concluded:
“The future of connected enterprise software is something we’re constantly thinking about at Surefront. Our goal from the start was to essentially build a Bloomberg Terminal for the retail industry – that singular point of technology, communication and transaction across an entire business. I’m very proud to say that we’ve stayed true to that vision, and that the product today speaks for itself.”
