Dating back to about 2006, I actually bought FileMaker in a box, and we did a
little drag-and-drop and put together what was an extremely remedial version
of the program, um, and we kind of started with that.
At the heart of it, Pin USA is a graphics house. We actually design
souvenir products for a lot of people in the entertainment industry--theme parks all over the world.
Um, places like the Hard Rock Cafes, we do their casinos, cafes, hotels...
but very souvenir-driven, with an emphasis on pins, keychains, magnets, lanyards and such.
It's evolved quite a bit in the last 20-some-odd years we've been in business.
On any given day, we could be working on anywhere from three
four, five hundred projects at different levels of completion.
When we first started, we were trying to keep track of everything using an Excel spreadsheet.
Well, the problem with that was, by the time we got a third of the way through the day,
the Excel spreadsheet was already obsolete.
Mario had done what many of the do-it-yourselfers do. He really had replicated a form or a sheet
of paper, but in the digital sense, inside of FileMaker. We've been able to take
that and surround it with relational pieces that make it vastly more powerful.
Typically, like I'll come in, I'll get settled in, the first thing I open is Claris FileMaker.
Our filing system before was paper and folder. We use d to have to go and fetch these things
from an actual filing cabinet, and nowadays, with the Claris FileMaker application,
it's easier to communicate with people um, in and out of the company.
Claris FileMaker is the backbone. It's a profit-maker.
It's more in-depth to the needs of the people that actually do the work,
and I think that's rare these days to find.
Here at Pin USA, we refer to our Claris FileMaker app as "Lola."
Because our business is so global, there's an event going on every weekend
somewhere in the world. So, one of the things that's really important to us is
staying on track and I think that's another thing that, you know, Lola does
for us is, she's constantly reminding us of what's--what the due dates are, you know,
what we're behind on. It is so powerful, we've actually had executives
from several Fortune 500 companies actually come in just to see the system at work.
And, I could see in their eyes they wish they had something like that to work with, quite frankly.