Cardiff By The Sea, Calif. – ICScolor, Inc., the world leader in display color management, announces the adoption of Remote Director by the omnichannel men’s grooming brand, Harry’s. Launched in 2013, Harry’s offers simple, high-quality men’s grooming, shaving, and personal care products, both direct-to-consumer and at retail. Harry’s has adopted Remote Director to revamp its internal color proofing workflow, with the ultimate goal of bringing product to market more quickly.

“By growing into an international personal care powerhouse, Harry’s faces a common challenge for brand owners trying to streamline their internal proofing process and managing their print production supply chain,” states Dan Caldwell, President, ICScolor, Inc. “Having a global footprint with headquarters in New York, production in Germany and internationally located vendors, Harry’s has experienced that shipping proofs back and forth, all around the globe for approval has become dramatically more expensive and time challenging. We created Remote Director to help brand owners dramatically shorten that proofing cycle while bringing significant cost savings.”

Another challenge for brand owners brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic is trying to manage a team of remote working creatives. Design teams are under pressure to create new product imagery, while several stakeholders still need to approve images for packaging, in-store displays and digital use. “With the pressure of remote working, the timelines for retouching projects have shrunk, and what used to happen in a week or two now has to be accomplished in days,” states Peter Possenti, Image Specialist at Harry’s Inc. “This is impossible with traditional proofing. Remote Director has had an immediate impact in the retouching and approval process for images. Now we can get through two to three rounds of corrections in one day, compared to three to five days per round. We can have multiple people reviewing for different aspects; one for structural comments, one for color, and so on, and their roles are defined by the software appropriately.”

“We were looking for a solution that could save us time and money and realized during this search that digital proofing could be a great option,” states Possenti. “Remote Director not only accomplishes our original goals, but also reduces our carbon footprint. We have begun rolling out the software and process to select vendors, who are also very excited to be a part of this process.”

“Remote Director is filling a need in the packaging production supply chain that has only been accentuated by the need for remote collaboration due to the restrictions of COVID-19,” states Vicki Blake, Vice President Business Development, ICScolor, Inc. “Brands such as Harry’s are using Remote Director for collaboration on color critical print projects. The same platform allows effective collaboration with their advertising agencies, pre-media providers, packaging converters and printers. Harry’s has been able to bring people into the image review process early on and get all of the commenting done in one pass. Previously, they would retouch to approval within the department, then the other departments would see it and often make more requests. Now, they can all comment simultaneously and those are consolidated automatically.”