Although Nominal is less than ten years old, the company’s Arabic-inspired jewelry already has a passionate following.
Started by a Palestinian husband-and-wife team, the brand sets out to inspire pride with jewelry designs that represent who a customer is as a person (including pieces showcasing someone’s name, native language, and hometown), as well as who they hope to become.
Nominal offers members of Muslim and Arab communities a unique way to express themselves, but the jewelry is also intended for anyone to wear with pride, regardless of background. Customers often find that others recognize the brand’s signature style on the street.
Kristine Miley was brought on board as director of operations to help scale the growth of the small business, which is based in Arizona. One of the first growth opportunities she identified was an inefficiency within the supply chain.
Miley had a successful experience using Jotform at a previous company, so she quickly onboarded the platform to shave time off Nominal’s fulfillment process and streamline customer interactions.
Now, Nominal enjoys a more efficient fulfillment process, less back-and-forth communication, and reduced third-party fees from its warehousing partner.
Case study results at a glance
An estimated $900 per month saved in supply-chain costs
Nominal’s fulfillment request form has eliminated the 24-hour workflow and the one-off requests that resulted in thousands of VAS fees.
Eliminated 24-hour fulfillment response time
The form eliminated the 24-hour response time for the US team and freed up time for overseas team members to spend on customer outreach.
Crowdsourced new package design
Collaborating directly with its community, Nominal created a jewelry box design that celebrated the shared vision of its customers.
Spotting blockers facing a growing business
As Nominal’s sales began to skyrocket, the brand needed someone to help facilitate the next phase of growth. Brought in to handle supply chain and customer experience, Miley found herself wearing multiple hats, including her primary role as well as marketing and product design — a familiar position for many in small businesses and startups.
Keeping an eye out for ways to automate manual processes, she noticed that Nominal’s internal and external communication with its third-party logistics team was suffering due to a hodgepodge of messaging apps and spreadsheets used across time zones.
In short, whenever a product issue arose that required assistance from the fulfillment center, Nominal’s staff would relay product details through Slack to a team member who was often in a different time zone. That employee would manually enter the issue into a worksheet to organize the data and then email the details to the fulfillment center.
As a result, the workflow was open to input errors and suffered from a 24-hour delay because of the time zone difference.
But perhaps the biggest opportunity to boost efficiency and communication involved eliminating price-per-unit VAS (value-added service) fees the fulfillment center charged Nominal for manual, one-off requests — for example, checking ring sizes or mis-shipments.
These VAS-related activities were time-consuming for fulfillment workers — especially during busy times of year, like Black Friday — as well as expensive, chipping away at Nominal’s profit margin.
Jotform solutions streamline product fulfillment
Miley quickly introduced a Jotform to streamline Nominal’s fulfillment process. Now, product details are reported to the fulfillment center via the form, reducing the chance that order numbers, issue types, and product details are misinterpreted.
Additionally, Miley took advantage of Jotform’s software integrations, integrating the form with Slack and Google Sheets to automatically send information to those platforms, creating transparency for internal and external teams and allowing for easy backend product categorization.
“Our fulfillment team now gets vetted issues immediately, as opposed to waiting for a staffer in another time zone to come online,” Miley said. “Now everyone has a shared document they can put notes in and view updates.”
Miley uses Jotform’s Digest Emails feature as well to give the fulfillment center a daily issues snapshot so it can prioritize its workload.
Miley also introduced another form for manufacturer-associated concerns. This form required photo attachments to be included before submission. Proper photo storage was critical given the sensitive nature of the form. With Jotform’s integration with Google Workspace apps, the form submissions have automated photo storage, data delivery, and cross-functional work.
And to formalize the reporting process around key trends, Miley uses Jotform’s Report Builder to automatically generate reports fit for C-level presentations.
The presentations from the Report Builder save us a substantial amount of time and ensure thorough, data-driven discussions around quality standards.
Kristine Miley, Director of Operations, Nominal
Automating hundreds of form submissions saves time and money
Working for a growing company, Miley has to manage her time efficiently, especially with so many direct reports and tasks to balance. She uses Jotform anywhere she can to help her optimize workflows.
Using the fulfillment request form has eliminated the 24-hour wait the US team previously endured, helping to ramp up daily productivity and freeing up their distant team member’s time.
“Now that employee is dedicated to reaching out to customers instead of spending entire days going back and forth with the fulfiller,” remarked Miley.
Plus, the introduction of the formal submission process has had a halo effect, eliminating the one-off requests that were resulting in VAS fees. Those fees could reach into the thousands on a monthly basis, so minimizing erroneous size verification and recount requests through automation was a big win.
“The cost savings [replacing the process of] copy/pasting data over so many submissions into a spreadsheet is huge,” Miley said.
The Report Builder feature has also helped Miley visualize and highlight product purchase types and dates so she can zoom in on specific manufacturer production batches.
Finally, Nominal used Jotform to launch a Ramadan Box design competition, engaging its community to contribute their creativity. The initiative resulted in over 100 inspiring submissions, highlighting the remarkable talent within the brand’s audience.
By collaborating directly with its community, Nominal was able to create a jewelry box design that resonated deeply and celebrated the shared vision of its customers, adding a meaningful touch to the final product.
Jotform has been invaluable in streamlining our operations, safeguarding quality, and creating deeper connections with our customers. We’re excited to explore even more ways to integrate Jotform!
Kristine Miley
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