-: My name is Sam Isomura.
I work for a company called Made For Retail.
So Made For Retail is a product development company,
so we do everything from design to execution.
So that means manufacturing our product overseas
and then working with our retailers and our customers
to really provide them with a whole
assortment of product.
So categories of product,
we do everything from stationary, so a lot of paper product,
to desk accessories, all the way to seasonal products.
So every season that America celebrates
we have decorations
and kind of favors to go along with that.
So I manage two teams.
One team works on the front end
of the product development process,
and then the second team manages through
the back end, the pre-production process,
so working with our manufacturers
and our factories overseas.
So six times a year we are
developing product for our customer
and a big portion of that is providing the presentation
to the customer.
And so the team that I work with that works
on the product development side
in the beginning of the product development process,
works a lot with art files and getting those to be specced
and designed to send to our factories
and then our factories create samples.
And then there's a lot of,
there's something called mock-ups.
So we mock-up our product and we make it look
as if it were going to look like,
ready to be sold in stores
and we present that to our customer.
So that's a big process.
It takes several weeks of time
and a lot of hands
on deck to do that and then we pitch it to our customer
and we go from there,
and we get a business order after,
and that's success for us.
So I've gone overseas to visit our manufacturers
to see how our product is made,
which really provides me some good context
to leading teams that work on this part of the process.
And then there's a lot of comp-shopping.
So just shopping just in the US area just to get
an idea of what other retailers have out there,
and then ...
That's about it.
Sometimes our customers do ask us
to go shopping with them which is cool,
but it depends on the category and
the time of the year for that.