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When Mark first started the company, it was a time when
the whole industry was known as trinkets and trash,
and there was a real opportunity to come in and do things differently
and approach it from a design perspective.
My name is Catherine Graham.
I am the President of Rightsleeve and the Co-Founder of Commonsku.
Rightsleeve creates promotional products which are essentially
anything that you put your brand on.
We've been on a mission with Rightsleeve from the beginning about
transforming the perception around promotional products and having
people view that medium as being equally as important as any other
advertising that the company can do.
We like to create merchandise that people actually wanted to receive
and were excited about receiving as opposed to a lot of what is out there;
when people get it, they'll just toss it in the landfill.
Technology has played a really important role from the early days.
It allowed us to take a step back from the business and really think about
what is the strategy going to be moving forward?
And how does technology play into this?
Back when we were looking to scale the business and we were looking
for alternatives from a technology perspective and there were
not a lot of great solutions out there for a small business.
So we decided to go down the crazy path of building our own solution.
And that was eventually what became Commonsku.
A business management platform for a small business.
There is a Facebook style news feed that is serving up all the
activity that is going on behind the scenes in the platform and creating
all this visibility and transparency.
They completely changed the way we ran the business.
If you'd ever told me ten years ago I'd be working with my husband,
I would have told you were absolutely nuts.
We're really, really lucky because we have a lot of fun working together.
We're able to trade off in terms of balancing, you know, family and home.
The touch screen interface has totally changed the way we use
technology around the house.
Our kids absolutely love technology and it is fascinating to watch the facility
they have with it.
These are the kids that are growing up that are becoming the
next generation of the workforce.
And they will have grown up with technology being an integral
part of their lives, and that's going to be a big impact and a big expectation
as they join the workforce.
It's a pivotal time right now in terms of how it is that technology is
transforming the way people work.
The ability to have such a huge amount of power in your fingertips
through a tablet because of the cloud and because of software.
You have everything you need at your fingertips.
It no longer matters where you work, or how you work, or when you work.
It's this incredible, you know, freedom and flexibility that technology
is enabling that I think is just fascinating.