Streamlining The Apparel Ordering Process
Founded in 1994, OOBE is a South Carolina-based strategic branded apparel company that outfits the employees of many industry-leading companies. The brand designs and produces dress shirts, sport shirts, polos and tees, pants, shorts, blazers, and other American touchstones that combine precise craftsmanship with effortless elegance and wearability. TeamStyle is the strategic branded apparel program custom-made for Chick-fil-A, designed by OOBE. This partnership supports 35,574 Operators, Team Leaders, and Team Members across more than 2,800 Chick-fil-A locations in 47 states, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico.
OOBE’s largest client, Chick-fil-A, faced an inconsistent and often manual apparel ordering experience. This was particularly true for its Operators who often had to rely on manual processes such as using spreadsheets to input Team Member details, collect sizes, and manage order submissions. After collecting sizes, the details were then manually loaded into the TeamStyle website or shared by phone for order processing. These manual processes often led to errors, delays, and a lack of uniformity across the company’s apparel orders.
As apparel ordering was an important part of the Team Member onboarding experience, OOBE knew that they needed to implement a new solution that enabled Operators to easily input Team Member details and manage orders digitally. By eliminating the need for manual data entry and ensuring a more consistent and efficient ordering experience for Chick-fil-A’s Operators, Team Members experienced a more frictionless onboarding experience and a better perception of their new employer.
The TeamStyle Connect app was designed to streamline and digitize Chick-fil-A’s apparel ordering experience. OOBE approached Bottle Rocket to help them create a digital solution that allowed Operators to create and manage Team Member profiles, create, and assign role-based look templates, digitally collect Team Member sizes, and view, track, and search order histories.
The team got right to work and began by conducting user research and focus groups to better understand the pain points, unique needs, and goals of both the Operator and Team Members. Throughout these sessions, the team uncovered the insight that they needed to provide Operators a tool that minimizes complexity and decreases the time it takes to assign, approve and order an accurate, role-specific uniform for a new employee. On the other hand, the Team Members needed a guided, relational experience that increased autonomy and confidence to select pre-approved uniform items in the right sizes. Throughout this user research, the team was able to identify the most valuable scenarios to be designed and included in the app, based on the goals for each persona.
The Bottle Rocket team identified the basic system flows and performed a technical assessment for both the Operator and Team Member experience thorough analysis of the requirements, as well as an assessment of the technical feasibility of the proposed solutions. Based on the findings, the team provided a platform recommendation that would best meet the needs of the product, considering factors such as scalability, cost-effectiveness, and ease of maintenance. The team brought the experience to life using the Flutter platform, a cost-efficient solution to address the widest range of operator devices across iOS and Android, but also to enable a web-based experience for Team Members with the same code base. This cross-platform experience not only reduced friction for the Operators but also for the Team Members who were able to submit one-time sizing via web instead of having to download a native mobile app.
This new platform solved immediate performance and maintenance issues, and ultimately positioned them for future differentiation in the market.
OOBE was also seeking to establish a closer and more direct connection with the Operators and Team Members who purchase and utilize their clothing. In order to ensure this connection, the Bottle Rocket team helped them define and implement their own API service on top of their existing e-commerce solution. The Bottle Rocket team also introduced OOBE to one of our partners, Amplitude, to implement enhanced analytics capabilities during the ordering process. Ultimately, the team was able to ensure that the product was not only functional and user-friendly but also scalable and easily maintainable.
Ultimately, the new-and-improved TeamStyle Connect app was born. The app provided a new way to streamline the TeamStyle ordering experience for both the Operators and the Team Members. As a trusted advisor, the Bottle Rocket team joined OOBE at the annual Chick-Fil-A conference to further evangelize the product to the Operators and Team Members. The new experience has seen over 250 total app downloads since the launch and the experience continues to bring efficiencies for both OOBE and Chick-fil-A.
