About
With products for flame, cooking and comfort, Zippo outdoor products are engineered to exceed and provides an unparalleled outdoor experience. In addition to the classic Zippo lighter, Zippo also markets candle lighters, utility lighters, men’s apparel and accessories, and outdoor products. Zippo owns W.R. Case and Sons Cutlery Company and the Ronson U.S.A. brand in, addition to Zippo U.K., Zippo Germany, Zippo SA, and Zippo Classic China. Zippo products are distributed in more than 160 countries.
Office: Bradford, Pennsylvania
Industry: Hardware Manufacturing
Use case: Project Management
Employees: 700+
The challenge
Senior Product Manager Chris Funk wanted to have a single PDF – created using PowerPoint – listing all of Zippo’s products, updates, milestones, and future plans. This gave the product team a single source of truth on active projects, allowing the product team to stay up to date at any given time and work accordingly.
What was meant to be a simple solution quickly became a full-time job. It took hours of time and effort across 22 people to put the catalogue together, every two weeks. By the time an update was ready to be published to the team, it would be outdated only hours later.
2 Updates per Month: Staying up to date is crucial to avoiding missed deadlines, delays and team tension.
22 Contributors: The catalogue needed input from 22 people, but only 3 of them could make the edits.
60 Collaborative Hours: PowerPoint cannot handle simultaneous users, which forces contributors to take turns.
36 Weeks per Year: 60 hours, twice per month is 36 Weeks. That more than just a lot of time; it’s a lot of money.
The solution
Teamwork that makes sense.
monday.com enables hundreds of people to work simultaneously, and see updates in real time. Now, all 22 members of the product team are responsible for their own announcements, updates and deadlines. They no longer have to wait for an editor to be free to do so.
The data you need. No more, no less.
With monday.com’s customizable web forms, Zippo can now map out the kind of data the product team wants to capture. The data then gets centralized in one place, automatically. No more time wasted on sorting out spreadsheet cells.
Stay in the know. Anticipate the knots.
While monday.com certainly helps reduce delays, other circumstances could still cause them. Zippo now sets deadline notifications to identify potential bottle necks before they could cause major delays in product launches, and subsequently, activating new revenue streams.
The impact
Time saved – 36 Weeks
Every one of those 36 weeks per year it took to keep their product catalogue updated was given back to the team. Time is your greatest return of investment
Money saved – $56,000 to $128,000
The average salary of a product manager in the U.S. is $78,000 – $185,000 per year. What would you invest in with 36 weeks of a product manager’s salary?
Productivity – 87% to Increase in active projects
With the very same workforce, Zippo reinvested the time and money they saved on tedious tasks into increasing their product line and activating new revenue streams
The future
With monday.com, Zippo is activating new revenue streams quicker than ever while also saving time on keeping the team up to date. We asked Chris what adopting monday.com would mean for the future of his department. He decided to go one step further and discuss the future of how the entire company collaborates.
Streamline communications and teamwork: Done
Increase product development in the US: Done
Increase production output in US and China: Working on it
Scale subsidiary companies in Europe and Asia: Working on it
