My parent’s company Gotham Archery has been considering putting their purchase history, booking system, and waiver release data to better use so that it might be used for more than basic legal purposes. Currently, the system is a mess and there’s very little documentation that assists in tracking customer habits beyond simple inventory management. The plan is to ensure that customer profiles are developed among those that opt into the Gotham Archery newletter so that marketing emails can be sent out only to those who we know might be interested in them.

My job in this plan is to help with transferring the customer data over to a new system, possibly even make a personalized database system from scratch, and then filter it to make sure everything important for future marketing practices is kept and cataloged. Every record needs to be easily searchable, filterable, and relevant, so no space is wasted. If all goes well, Gotham Archery will have a much better way to tell which of its existing customers to market high margin services to, such as the ability to track the amount of hours a particular person has shot since their last bow maintence session, so that we can send a reminder that they should consider getting a bow restringing and the like.

I’m excited to be responsible for such a big undertaking, and talking to not just my dad, but other Gotham Achery partners and higher management about how this process should be done and what I need to include or scrap has been an enlightening experience that should be similar to client commission work that you might see in proper programming jobs.