Product Guru

Who's Product Guru?

Product Guru is a procurement platform with a modern twist. They rely on digital channels to revolutionize the procurement industry. How? By facilitating the connection between independent brands and UK’s major retailers. They want the right products to find the right sellers and make it easier than ever before.

To that end, Product Guru developed an online platform for brands to showcase their products and for retailers to browse them. But the company doesn’t stop at that. They also experiment with a variety of other initiatives that encourage digital or asynchronous communication between the parties. Some of these are virtual pitches, digital showrooms, and the POP - a tech-driven pop-up concept store.

How the POP is revolutionizing the industry

The POP is an entirely new idea for a concept store. While displayed at physical events, it doesn’t need to be attended to by the seller. Instead, during the event, buyers can visit and browse the store at their convenience. They can also buy, learn about, or inquire about the products through a mobile application.

For the seller, this reduces the cost spent on having someone on-site at all times. Even more importantly, it provides them with analytical data, such as how many times an item was scanned or saved. Not to mention, this new way of merchandising gives them unique exposure as the event attracts plenty of buyers interested in the novelty of it all. Buyers they can engage with also after the event!

For the buyers, this solution equals convenience. Now they can browse the store whenever they want throughout the event and have all the information they need about the product at their fingertips. They can also request samples, save the items for later or share with others, and easily buy them when they have made their final decision. If they need to contact the seller, there’s nothing easier – they can schedule virtual or in-person follow-up meetings straight from the app!

How did Gorrion help?

In an increasingly digitized world, it’s only a matter of time before we have to reinvent the procurement experience. The POP by Product Guru is one way to approach this subject in a way that improves overall experience for both merchants and buyers. However, this whole idea hinges on technology, so to be successful it really needed to deliver on that front. In this case, the mobile app is a stand-in for a real person as the first point of contact. If it were to constantly crash, lag, or throw errors, it would just frustrate the buyers.

This is why Product Guru decided to work together with Gorrion Software House on deploying the mobile app used by buyers at the event. Despite having an amazing team responsible for backend and web development as well as fantastic designers, Product Guru lacked necessary expertise to develop a flawless mobile app that would be compatible with their backend. Especially with the time constraints they had.

The challenge

Gorrion Software House was recommended to Product Guru by one of their executives who was very satisfied with our work before. He knew that we could deliver a great mobile app and do it on time. This was the biggest issue – time was short, because we were constrained by an immovable deadline. We had to deliver the solution for the event that was already scheduled. It took us three months from first contact with Product Guru to delivery.

The results were great! Our team attended the event to see the solution in action and we’re happy to report: the inaugural event was a success, and as for us – everyone was satisfied with the app. On top of that, we really enjoyed working with Product Guru developers who are great collaborators who know their stuff.