shopVOX Customer of the Month: LogoBoss

In this article, shopVOX is sharing what we learned from an interview with Tim Smith, owner of the Dublin, California-based print and sign shop LogoBoss.

We have enjoyed speaking with various sign business owners lately about using shopVOX in their daily operations and how the software has helped them become more efficient and grow.

What Does LogoBoss Do?

LogoBoss is based in Dublin, California, outside of San Francisco. The company has been in business for nearly 25 years at this point.

It started out as awards and engraving company. The business later added apparel, embroidery, screen printing, promotional products, and signage to its product line. Today, about 50% of LogoBoss’s production output is screen printing and embroidery for apparel. About 20% is promotional products, while awards and signage are 15% each.

Owner Tim Smith said the sheer diversity of products LogoBoss offers makes daily operations a bit chaotic, but it also puts the company in the top tier of sign shops due to what it can do for its customers.

LogoBoss produces most of its product line in-house, although promotional products and a few other offerings are outsourced simply due to them being beyond the shop’s scope of work.

The LogoBoss Team

LogoBoss currently employs 14 people, with half of them in production and the other half in customer service and administrative positions.

The business maintains two locations: the main location is also a showroom and production center, and the other is more for screen printing, inventory, and fulfillment. Tim Smith stated his goal is one day to bring both locations together into a single large center.

How LogoBoss Started

Tim Smith and his wife have owned LogoBoss nearly since its inception. Tim and a roommate started the company in a much smaller form, and he took full ownership in 1996.

He said he was always interested in design and graphics. As he began working in these areas, he found he truly enjoyed the design aspect but eventually transitioned to become more knowledgeable in production. He liked seeing graphic design manifested as actual products, which is how he became intrigued by awards, signage, and apparel.

Since the early years, Tim Smith has focused on trying to shift the company’s marketing into a more corporate-business arena. His goal was to present LogoBoss as a one-stop-shop to fulfill all of a business’s needs, recognizing that representatives from such organizations would likely not want to deal with multiple shops for everything they have to purchase. Becoming more efficient in this area has helped LogoBoss grow faster over the years.

Due to the direction, Tim took LogoBoss in its marketing to corporations, the company now gets its top 50% of income from only around 25 clients, while the bottom 50% is spread out over about 250 clients.

Current Projects

Tim said his company has been working steadily to come through the COVID-19 pandemic. Between 2019 and 2020, sales decreased 30% for his shop as consumerism across the United States and the world ground to a halt in the wake of the virus’s spread.

He expects 2021 to be a stronger year for sales since markets have been slowly moving back to normal as the harshest effects of the pandemic continue to ease.

Lately, LogoBoss has been working on on-boarding products for its various clients. This involves producing the free merchandise that a company will present to a new hire on the first day of work (or to the client’s own clients).

For instance, LogoBoss might print or embroider a client’s logo onto sweatshirts, hats, tumblers, business cards, decals, and stickers.

LogoBoss has been pushing more into this area of printing. It requires intensive working hours for the shop to coordinate, but Tim Smith said that clients have appreciated the results.

How LogoBoss Uses shopVOX

LogoBoss had used four other sign shop programs before starting with shopVOX’s print shop software in 2016. Tim said he had initially thought shopVOX was directed only toward signage shops, but the fact that shopVOX helps him to manage his business’s other areas--the printing and embroidery, etc.--has made it the best such program for him.

The main area of shopVOX that LogoBoss uses daily is the job board. Tim and the General Manager of the business only have to open the job board to see the status of each job in progress. The staff can sort the jobs based on the type, such as embroidery, screen printing, signage, engravings, and so on.

LogoBoss’s customer service representatives also use the job board to update orders as they progress through to successive stages of production. Tim said that updating the job board is vital because it allows the shop to see which projects are nearing completion and which still need to wait on certain other factors.

Further, LogoBoss’s sales department mainly uses shopVOX’s Sales Leads module. The employees can see which leads need further attention, such as follow-up phone calls or seeing if prospective customers viewed quotes.

Before discovering shopVOX, Tim says his company’s main problem was an order flow in disarray. Production did not progress as smoothly as it should have. As a result, customer service employees thought orders were ready to ship, but in fact, production would actually be stalled.

Another problem was that proofing was not integrated with the actual jobs. Tim likes that shopVOX is able to join proofing with orders so that the shop can see if a customer viewed a proof but did not approve it yet or maybe did not view the proof at all.

This helps keep LogoBoss on top of its orders automatically, whereas before, the shop had to rely on manually emailing proofs and following up with those customers by email.

Tim Smith told us that this aspect of shopVOX lets LogoBoss hold everyone accountable in the proof-approval process. It forces customers to approve a design before production begins while ensuring that customer service follows up with the customer in all the appropriate ways.

Finally, to complement these aspects, shopVOX’s payment area helps them to increase the shop’s workflow because, now, orders moving into production are linked to customer payments.

This has made projects more efficient, and that word is important to LogoBoss. According to Tim, shopVOX’s sign shop programs have overall made LogoBoss a much more efficient company.

The other big-picture benefit that shopVOX has provided LogoBoss is that the software has centralized internal communication so everyone can keep track of orders and update one another so nothing gets lost in daily operations.

While Tim spends a great deal of time at his shop, you might find him skiing and snowboarding in the Sierra Nevadas on snowy days. He is a proud grandparent, and also enjoys spending time with his family outside of the office. 

Be sure to check out LogoBoss when you are in need of any custom printed apparel, signs, or promotional products. Tim and his team have got you covered!