Client Review: A Mermaid Merchandise Company

Client Review

Please describe your company and your position there

I am the Director of IT for Fin Fun Mermaid. We are a retail company that specializes in swimmable mermaid tails, swimwear, and pool toys, and other items that help children and adults to live their dreams.

For what projects/services did your company hire Bizmia, and what were your goals?

We sell across a wide variety of channels, from our website to retail locations. We also have an ERP that is crucial to helping us make decisions based on data. Bizmia was hired to provide both quality developers that can implement our vision, and consulting resources that can guide us towards current best practices while alerting us of future possibilities.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We searched for a vendor for over 6 months, because we were more concerned with finding the right fit than getting someone working with us immediately. In the process of selection, we spoke with vendors from many different countries and many different business types. The criteria for our selection were:

• Expertise in the technology stack that we have in production.
• Availability of resources
• Ability to communicate effectively with our teams
• Service pricing in each of these criteria, Bizmia was by far the best choice for us.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used

Our first work orders that we gave to Bizmia were to fix many miscellaneous bugs in our Magento 2 storefront. We submitted many different tasks to the team, but we prioritized them according to business needs.

The very first task that they fixed for us was to correctly display attribute inventory for a complex product detail page on our website.

We have a project manager and a dedicated developer at Bizmia. They were very thorough and professional in identifying the requirements, estimating the time per task. And communicating progress and issues along the way to completion.

They gave us a high-level overview of how they would proceed, and the deliverables were working code that could be immediately demonstrated, tested, and deployed by our own internal team.

The icing on the cake for us was discovering how truly optimized their processes were for getting things done efficiently.

How many people from the vendor’s team worked with you, and what were their positions?

I directly work with three people at Bizmia. A sales representative, a project manager that facilitates the work and provides consultation, and a lead developer that gives updates and status about the tasks. Each of them is respectful, engaged, competent, and fun. They are the type of people that you can rely on.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

As the IT representative for Fin Fun. I provide the requirements for the entire company, but many of those come from other departments (such as marketing or operations).

In each task that I have passed to Bizmia. The originating department has been blown away by how fast Bizmia was able to execute to completion. In particular, marketing has been ecstatic to know that there is now a resource available to help them dream big and be creative.

The very first task that Bizmia completed got me multiple happy emails from the Web Director and Customer Care reps at Fin Fun, and more importantly it eliminated a costly over-allocation rate on a popular bundled product that we sell.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness

Bizmia uses well-known tools and methodologies, such as GitHub for versioning, JIRA for task management, Microsoft Teams for Remote communications and meetings, and Amazon AWS for fast spin-up of server architecture.

Bizmia’s style of project management is focused effort and streamlined communication, borrowing concepts from Agile, Scrum, and Waterfall methods to best suit our needs.

The flexibility that they have, as well as the speed in determining what we really want, is clearly a result of constantly improving their processes after every task that they complete, regardless of the customer.

We have weekly meetings, and they are succinct but sufficient. One thing that has been fantastic is their mechanism for branching code in such a way that multiple tasks can be worked on simultaneously while maintaining functional independence. It makes it a cakewalk if we need to ramp up testing and development.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

In my 20+ years as an IT professional, I have worked with many types of developers and vendors.

There is a large skillset spectrum, but one thing that can be frustrating for departments outside of IT is a lack of patience or empathy.

That can (and has) given the IT industry a bad reputation.  But Bizmia has done an outstanding job of demonstrating technical excellence without sacrificing emotional intelligence.

They truly seem to enjoy their work- and interacting with them as a customer doesn’t feel like they are grinding through a necessary but annoying burden.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Thus far, the only thing I think they could improve or do different is to
market themselves better! If I would have found them in the first week of our search, I could have saved 5 months of effort.

Scheduling

ON TIME / DEADLINES

They are very good about communicating availability and identifying optimum times for us.

Cost

VALUE / WITHIN ESTIMATES

There are many other vendors that we approached that had lower costs, but they didn’t demonstrate anywhere near the same level of competence.

QUALITY SERVICE & DELIVERABLES

Finished ahead of schedule, better than we expected, and immediately functional. What more could we ask for?

NPS (Net Promoter Score) WILLING TO REFER

They have solidified a good reputation with me.

Original Reviews from clients can be reviewed at Clutch.