Irene Jeremic, Stork Craft’s Corporate Executive and CIO, re energized Ragazzi Fine Furniture with her comprehensive business processes and an innovative order, inventory and sales management system, that enabled unlimited sales growth
Ragazzi is the fine furniture division of Stork Craft Manufacturing Inc., that has been specializing in baby furniture making for the past 60 years
Many people know her as the Stork Craft icon and the woman who helped turn the Stork Craft’s business around. A few know that she was also tasked with revamping an inefficient Ragazzi operation, that Stork Craft acquired just a few years ago. She seems to be a woman who holds the man’s world of furniture distribution in her fingertips.
In 2006, D& F Furniture that originally made Ragazzi Fine Furniture collections was in trouble. Its brand name was sold to Stork Craft, the company that was at the time also going through its business processes makeover. Irene Jeremic, Stork Craft’s chief information officer (CIO) and head of e-commerce, IT and Sales Services was busy with engineering Stork Craft business solutions and setting the company for growth.
“We acquired the Ragazzi name and purchased some inventory, looking forward to fresh designs,” says Jeremic, who is now the Corporate Executive Advisor of Stork Craft companies.
“We were getting ready for the next year’s launch of the new Ragazzi line, and the stream was initially assigned to someone else. Several months into the acquisition, I was approached to assist with the business processes associated to the Ragazzi branded products.”
“Irene and her teams had a track record of building the state-of-the-art business solutions. Ragazzi was the first brand we acquired. It was a natural choice to ask Irene to find a way to organize order processing, inventory management and reporting for both sales agents and internal stakeholders,” said Dan Ward, VP Sales and Marketing. “In months, Irene and her teams did miracles!”
Jeremic describes a task as a challenging but interesting endeavor. She started from scratch and steadily improved various characteristics of sales processing and management—from processing speed to reliability and response times.
“We quickly established procedures that worked for both our clients and sales agents and then built a web-based database-driven solution with the time-bound automatic reporting around it,” said Jeremic. “We employed the latest technology and have been recognized for our award-winning solutions”.
Ragazzi Fine Furniture soon emerged as a commercially viable business stream. “What we needed was sales and increased visibility among specialty stores”, added Jeremic.
Jeremic reported that the system has been in use since 2007 and it has now been synergized with Furnish Web—a similar system for furniture distributors.
“Once you deliver a business solution over the Internet, it’s difficult to re-invent the wheel,” concludes Jeremic. “Synergies like the one with Furnish Web, however, are always possible and welcome,” she concludes.
