PBN C-SUITE 2021 AWARDS
Stuart Kiely
John Matouk & Co. vice president of digital strategy
The pandemic year of 2020 kept millions of people at home, and many of them decided they wanted to roost in the company of luxurious, high-quality bath, bed and table linens.
For John Matouk & Co., the Fall River-based manufacturer of fine linens, 2020 brought a huge upswing in sales.
Although nobody at Matouk saw the COVID-19 pandemic coming, a program of digital transformation that the company began planning in 2015 placed it in a position to work even more efficiently at a time when managers were scattered to their homes and each day brought new challenges.
Stuart Kiely, Matouk’s vice president of digital strategy for the past eight years, helped steer the two-year process of digital transformation, which went live in January 2017. The transformation pulled the company’s functions out of their digital silos and unified them under a single management platform. Kiely watched the greater transparencies and efficiencies dramatically prove their value over the past year.
Gross revenue at Matouk rose from $37.9 million in 2019 to $57.4 million in 2020, the company reports. Retail sales conducted directly through the website Matouk.com – which does not include sales through retailers such as Bloomingdales or Nordstrom – doubled in the past year, Kiely said, to $15 million.
“We hired Stu years ago primarily to run and build our e-commerce,” said George Matouk, the company’s president. “But over time it became clear that we stood to benefit from a radical transformation of our IT [information technology].”
Matouk added, “Stu … understood early on that digital tools, access to data and a new mindset would lead to [a] competitive advantage through a cloud-based system.”
In March 2020, when the news of COVID-19 was spreading into the United States and shutdowns began, the company moved into making face masks. It “allowed us to contribute to the cause,” Kiely said, and allowed the factory to keep functioning in the early spring.
Ultimately, over the course of 2020, Matouk said, his company made 300,000 face masks, giving away 100,000 to schools or medical facilities and selling the remaining 200,000 at manufacturing cost.
Then, last May, retail sales of the bed and bath lines made by the 90-year-old company began to boom.
“People were thinking, ‘If I am going to be stuck at home, I am going to make it really beautiful,’ ” Kiely said.
The pandemic hit the U.S. just a little more than three years after the 2017 launch of the company’s massive transformation. The process uses the Salesforce.com customer relationship management platform and its Rootstock manufacturing resources planning system.
The digital transformation involved “uprooting every business system in the organization and migrating them to a modern-day platform,” Kiely said. That includes finance, inventory, purchasing, forecasting, customer relations and human resources.
This project is intended to fix the problem of data siloing, when various business functions are operated by different programs, making it difficult for functions to communicate and collaborate with each other. The information lives in the cloud, stays updated and uniform, and is accessible by Matouk workers in any location.
At the manufacturing plant, Salesforce allowed the automation of some formerly physical actions. For instance, Rootstock allowed sales orders to be generated and conveyed to the warehouse electronically.
Using Salesforce and Rootstock was enormously valuable to fulfill orders during the pandemic year, but their value was proven much earlier. In an April 2018 blog post, Rootstock reported – and Kiely confirmed – that Matouk’s return on investment rose by 223% during a previous six-month period. Kiely said this was partly because the digital efficiencies allowed the company to manage and control inventory much more effectively, moving in the direction of a just-in-time inventory system.
George Matouk is grateful for the business acumen and personal kindness of employees such as Kiely. “He is just a great person; he goes above and beyond to help other people achieve their business goals,” he said.