A nationwide landscape-supply network · Trade distribution · B2B
Hundreds of branches, a catalog past a hundred thousand SKUs — and professionals burning their most billable hours on ghost stock and 6 AM queues.
Client identities withheld by design. Engagements delivered as lead across previous consulting roles; figures are each engagement's findings and committed design targets.
The situation
Physically, a fortress: hundreds of branches, product breadth no regional rival could match, and deep human expertise at every counter. Digitally, a liability: an app that showed stock the branch didn't have, twenty-minute waits in the 6 AM contractor rush, vague delivery windows that left crews idle, and month-end account statements that took an evening to reconcile. The core customers — owner-operators whose office is a truck, and Spanish-first crew leaders running the job sites — were losing the one asset they can never buy back: billable time.
What the diagnosis found
Anti-friction, not anti-tech
The ground-level customer had adopted a flawed app anyway, because saving time is that compelling. The barrier was never willingness — it was reliability. If it works every single time, adoption follows.
Five stages of friction
The professional's journey broke at every stage: planning ran on knowledge gaps, ordering on ghost stock, pickup on queues, delivery on vague ETAs, billing on reconciliation. Each digital touchpoint that failed forced a manual workaround — defeating the point of digital.
The language ceiling
An English-only workflow locked out the bilingual crew leaders who actually run the sites. Inclusion wasn't a nice-to-have; it was a precondition for the whole digital strategy.
One storefront failing two customers
Professional depth intimidated retail homeowners into abandoning; retail traffic returned zero value to the professionals. The one-size-fits-all site was quietly failing both.
The redesign
Fix before wow
Phase one bought back trust: what the app shows must be what the branch has. Predictive, weather-aware inventory to end ghost stock; live truck tracking with real ETAs to end the "where is my delivery" call.
A branch expert that never sleeps
An AI assistant trained on the full catalog — answering technical questions around the clock, and turning an uploaded project plan into a near-complete parts list in minutes instead of days.
Bilingual as infrastructure
The entire workflow — search, order, track, ask — made fluent in the crew's first language, from the app to the AI to the training content. Confidence in your own language is a feature.
Two tracks, one engine
A homeowner track selling curated project kits, and a professional track with the full catalog and integrations — with retail traffic converted into a contractor-referral engine for the professional customers. Serve both. Confuse neither.
What the blueprint committed to
100%
app reliability set as the non-negotiable phase-one bar
10s
reorder target for repeat jobs, from job history
24/7
AI branch expert designed for customers and staff alike
Ground-level customers are never anti-technology. They are anti-friction — and they forgive nothing that wastes billable time.
The first principles at work
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