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What exactly is Essentiel Antwerp?
Essentiel Antwerp is a fashion company, based in Antwerp, known for its refreshing, surprising and luxurious fashion, with unusual graphic and floral prints and trendy colour mixes. It was founded in 1999 by Inge Onsea and Esfandiar Eghtessadi. What started then as a small T-shirt brand has now grown into an international brand with nearly 30 own shops worldwide and a broad multi-brand network. We focus our e-commerce mainly on the EU and the US.
What is your role within the company?
I work as legal counsel. My manager Ruth and I are responsible for most of the contractual documents within the company. Essentiel Antwerp is a family business with a head office of around 50 to 60 employees, which means that all teams work closely together and many matters therefore pass through our team. Think of marketing collaborations, establishment of shops, agreements with marketplaces, and so on.
How did you come to Contractify?
We were looking for a solution because we have a considerable amount of contracts and it is difficult to keep track of all the data manually. Until about eight years ago, there was no legal department at our company, so documents were stored in many different places: on servers, in folders.... We really needed a platform to centralise everything. After some research with both international and Belgian companies, we finally ended up with Contractify.
What problems/challenges did you have before using Contractify and what consequences did this have?
One of the problems was that contracts and documents were scattered across different locations. Then when someone asked for a particular document, it was often difficult to find it again. Everyone had their own way of storing them, which could cause confusion.
Another problem was that we sometimes found out too late when a contract needed to be terminated. As a result, we were stuck with contracts we didn't really want any more, with financial consequences. For the commercial leases of our shops, we kept data in an Excel file, but this did not work efficiently because you then also have to reflexively go and look in your file all the time. This could cause stress.
How did you try to solve this before Contractify?
We had the idea of using our internal IT team to build our own contract server, including access rights, but our IT team had limited time and space for this, taking into account a number of large projects within e-commerce etc. Using Excel also proved to be less than ideal. With Contractify, you get automatic reminders, which prevents a lot of stress and errors.
How did you solve this with Contractify?
Since February, about six months ago, we have been working with Contractify. Although not everyone uses it intensively yet, I have already started using it extensively myself for our commercial leases, among other things. All new contracts are also uploaded into the system by default. Contractify automatically sets tasks, and I add extra tasks myself to make sure everything is followed up on time. The tasks also adjust the pace at which things are discussed and reviewed internally. I also set notifications for things like, for example, depositing a deposit on a certain date, to make it easier to keep appointments.
Looking up contracts and documents is now also much easier for our colleagues. Everyone now has their own account and almost everyone has activated it. So they can immediately find the right contract, associated documents and important dates themselves without having to go through us first.
What convinced you to start using Contractify?
For us, the biggest challenges after signing contracts were in managing and monitoring them. That is also what Contractify is focused on. Other, more comprehensive systems might have had too many features that we didn't need and would only complicate things. Similarly, many systems focus on negotiating contracts. For us, the problem was less about negotiating and creating contracts. We might do that in a more classic way, but we actually haven't really had any problems with that at the moment, and we find that other companies also still use Word with track changes. Maybe not the most modern thing, but that's how it often still works in practice.
Another big plus for us is also that Contractify can process an unlimited number of documents. For us, this is more important than an unlimited number of users.
Finally, the local support is very pleasant. If something is not clear, I can always contact Jasper from Customer Support directly, which is much nicer than a service desk in America, let’s say.
How will Contractify impact your business and way of working?
It is still too early to put a concrete number on it, but we are already definitely noticing a positive impact. Deadlines are now no longer missed, which also significantly reduces stress. Contractify provides a central place where all important data around contracts is collected, which makes searching for documents and following up on appointments much easier. In the long run, we will also see more cost savings, simply by reducing unnecessary contract renewals.
Which feature in Contractify is most important to you?
Mainly the tasks, the automatic notifications, and the folder structure. The folder structure we are very happy with, because you also have systems where you just have tags, but we find the combination in Contractify very useful and more structured.
What do you think of Contractify's support?
As I already mentioned, I am really super satisfied Contractify's support. They are always easy to reach and my questions are answered very quickly.
