Luke Winter and Tristan Kampman bought Granola Galaxy 3 years ago when the company served less than 100 customers direct, mostly in its Northern California home market.  They liked the product, the brand and the potential opportunity for growth.

And grow it did.  Galaxy has added over 1,000 stores since Luke and Tristan showed up.  For the first two years, they used Excel to manage their customer information.  It didn’t scale and Luke nearly lost his mind trying to keep track of it all.  Out of frustration, Luke commented, “It doesn’t matter how good you are in Excel, it’s just not meant to be used as a database.” Yet so many people are using and abusing spreadsheets in this capacity. Luke and Tristan set out on a search for an appropriate database/CRM tool. Their requirements for the solution were that it must be customizable and flexible.

‘We considered Filemaker and Access; but knew it would require a lot of work to get started and we didn’t have that time and energy to put towards it. And Salesforce wasn’t quite customizable enough for our needs,’ said Luke.

So they decided on QuickBase and have been using it since January 2008 for their customer service management needs – specifically tracking the status of customers, where customers are located, what product the customers carry and how much they have in inventory at any given time, as well as other associated activities like in-store demo schedules and staffing. Recently Galaxy has moved their Purchase Order management to the QuickBase platform. Luke said, ‘QuickBase helps us provide a level of customer service and follow-up comparable to that of much larger companies.’

Even though Galaxy Granola is a small operation today, they are serving large customers across the US like Whole Foods, Wegman’s, and Albertson’s. They’ve got big plans for growth and that includes increased usage of QuickBase over time. As their business needs and processes evolve, QuickBase applications can evolve with them.

Luke commented, ‘QuickBase is a customizable online database that can be used for a variety of business functions. We really value the flexibility the product has to offer. QuickBase has a huge advantage there. We can adapt and make changes on the fly.’