PopSockets Gets Crisper Detail into Sales

PopSockets is best known for its knob-like phone grips, selling more than 275 million of them in the past decade. Since launching the grips, the company has expanded into an ecosystem of related products, including phone cases, wallets, mounts, batteries, and chargers.

The company was founded in 2012 and sold its first products in January 2014 via direct sales on its website. Now, the Boulder, Colo.-based company sells its products not only through its own website and online through Amazon, but also in big-box stores like Target, Best Buy, Walmart, Staples, CVS, and Walgreen’s, and through dedicated smartphone retail locations.

Though sales have always tracked well, the popular smartphone accessories company didn’t have insight into how individual stores were actually doing both in terms of sales and inventory, according to Kyle Chu, PopSockets’ business intelligence analyst.

The company was also having difficulty understanding which products were resonating with customers and which stores had adequate inventory, according to Chu, who notes that a lack of inventory in some stores led to lost sales.

There were times when stores claimed to have had an adequate supply of PopSockets products, but physical spot-checks showed that they had nothing left, Chu relates.

“Target has 2,000 stores. We wanted to know how a store in downtown New York City was doing compared to a store in Fargo, N.D. Getting to that level of granularity was a challenge,” he says. “We were also looking for a way to extract that granular detail from Amazon, our retail channel, and our own website.”.

PopSockets started looking for a solution in late 2022 and eventually selected Crisp’s collaborative commerce platform, which provides real-time and long-term insight into every store’s sales and inventory. PopSockets went fully live with the solution in the first half of 2023.

Crisp was chosen over competitors due to the ease of implementing its technology and the seamless integration with Snowflake, which PopSockets uses for data warehousing.

“The ease of connecting Crisp with our [point-of-sales] systems and our warehouse technology was a major selling point,” Chu says. “Secondarily, it was the normalization of the data. They didn’t just deliver raw data, they normalized the data for our use.”

Though the integration with Snowflake was seamless, Crisp and PopSockets had to work together to backfill the historical sales and inventory information and to customize the out-of-the-box dashboards to provide the look and feel desired.

“We ingested all of the data into Snowflake, then during the normalization, we wrote our own queries and reporting tools,” Chu says.

That customization provided PopSockets with views into individual stock-keeping units (SKUs), week-by-week sales and inventory levels, and a host of other granular detail. It took a few weeks to port the historical data into the platform, perform the customization, and apply PopSockets’ business logic before the solution could go live.

The advantages of using the Crisp platform were clearly demonstrated last year, with sales at Best Buy growing by 44 percent; at Amazon Vendor Central by 12 percent; and at Target by 7 percent. Additionally, Target’s top-performing stores had PopSockets’ products available for purchase 95 percent of the time.

Chu also credits Crisp, in part, for the strong sales of PopSockets’ MagSafe line at Target and Walmart. MagSafe uses a magnetic rather than an adhesive attachment, and sales of that product have already surpassed sales of its classic grips.

“Our engagement with Crisp has provided us with really good channel level detail,” Chu says.

During 2025, PopSockets expects to work with Crisp to develop a dedicated Target dashboard, which would go along with the dedicated Walmart and Amazon dashboard that the company already uses. 

The Payoff

Since implementing Crisp, Popsockets has seen the following results:

• grew sales 44 percent at Best Buy in 2024 compared to 2023;
• boosted sales at Amazon Vendor Central 12 percent in 2024 compared to 2023, along with improving inventory tracking and demand forecasting; and
• increased in-stock rates at Target by 7 percent and is now maintaining a greater than 95 percent availability rate at Target’s top-performing stores.