Danae Shell, Editor of Knickers, the lingerie weblog, wrote to us about how her team uses 37signals products.
I thought you might be interested in how I use Highrise, Backpack and Campfire to manage my lingerie weblog and related businesses.
I'm the editor of Knickers, the lingerie weblog and work with another writer and my business partner. The logistics of organising and keeping in touch between the three of us were a nightmare at first - two of us are in Scotland and our writer is in the States, and both Katie and Alison aren't tech saavy and react with suspicion to any new technology I turn them onto. I needed a way to capture their work and keep it organised, so I slowly started introducing 37S tools to them - we started with Backpack for writing business plans and doing research, then moved into Highrise to keep a "collective inbox" and mailing list, then finally to Campfire to generally stay in touch.
Backpack
Backpack has been a fantastic way to quickly capture and organise information without any overheads - Alison and I will sit on the phone and chat about our ideas, then will look up prices, etc., and paste them into Backpack. We both edit the page as we talk, and at the end of the call we've captured a ton of research and ideas. It's a great way to store and share research in a structured format without e-mailing files back and forth.
Knickers keeps a to-do list in Backpack.
Highrise
Highrise has been a perfect way to keep track of what we're saying to who. All three of us are constantly in contact with designers, retailers, and readers, and it was getting really old having to cc: or forward: to everyone each time we wanted to share something. Now we use Highrise as a communal inbox and also use it to build our internal contact information - all contacts are tagged according to how we work with them, and we even track our christmas card list through tags. Finally, I use Highrise as my first step for accounting - I forward any e-mail invoice with a +later todo, and go through the list once a week to enter the details into my accounting system.
Knickers' Highrise Dashboard.
Campfire
Finally, Campfire has been an essential way to stay in touch with everyone and coordinate what we do. Everyone stays in the room all day and pops out when they need to, and we leave each other messages and photos throughout the day. We've recently been designing and selling a new line of silk lingerie bags, and Campfire has been invaluable for keeping everyone in the loop - i can have a half hour conversation with Katie about a marketing idea for the bags, and don't even have to fill Alison in - the next time we meet we'll just pick up where the Campfire conversation left off.
Knickers chats in Campfire.
The consistency and ease of use of 37S tools has been the number one feature for us - I'm now eyeing up Basecamp as an overall organiser, and know that introducing it to the others won't be a huge buy-in problem because they're already familiar with the basic UI. As a small business that's constantly starved for time, it's great to know that everyone will be able to work together without giant technical hurdles.
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.
