Arctic Circle Enterprises
Using Intervals to manage the design process for custom and wholesale apparel and hard goods in the gift and tourist industry

Arctic Circle Enterprises, otherwise known as ACE, traces its roots to America’s Last Frontier, where in 1955, Henry Godfred visited Alaska and started selling souvenirs out of his suitcase. It wasn’t long before the business outgrew his suitcase and the operation was moved into a warehouse and office space.

Today, ACE is the largest Alaskan distributor of apparel, souvenirs, and gifts designed by Alaskan artists. From chain stores to gift shops to cruise lines, visitors to Alaska can choose from a broad line of gifts including t-shirts, hoodies, outerwear, ceramics, kitchen towels and accessories, socks, baseball caps, totes, key chains, magnets, ornaments, plushes, and more.

A Collaborative Approach to Logistics

Our company used to be small enough I could keep track of the jobs in my head. When business picked up there was just too much going on to have visibility for everyone. We needed to find some sort of task management system.

ACE experienced a significant growth milestone in 1995. Up until then, project managers could still keep track of most jobs in their head. This approach became less sustainable as more jobs came pouring in, so they began using software to manage jobs. Eventually, they found their way to Intervals in 2012.

Producing and delivering custom and wholesale apparel and hard goods requires collaboration as much as it does logistics, and Intervals ability to customize task management workflows meant it could do both. With different jobs in different stages, Intervals gave the team visibility into every task, so they could find out exactly where the task was left — without having to involve a project manager.

How to Grow with the Flow

We looked at other task management systems and they seemed really convoluted compared to Intervals, which is more streamlined.

The artists, designers, directors, and managers at ACE rely on their customized task management workflows to keep everyone on the team aligned. Each job originates from a sales rep who emails the requirements to the request queue. From there, the work is assigned as a task and given an automated, unique job number that ACE uses on their backend to correlate art files with the originating task. Anyone on the team can quickly look up the status of each job, or reference the history of a product, simply by looking up the task number in Intervals.

Intervals not only enables the team to juggle multiple jobs at once, it keeps those jobs moving smoothly while freeing up the project manager to focus on the big picture. ACE has streamlined the logistics of producing and delivering products so effectively that they are now venturing out into new industries. As ACE continues to grow, they have the confidence of knowing that Intervals will adapt and grow with them.

Want to experience the benefits of customizing Intervals to manage your workflows?
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