John Ricci
Founder & CEO, Danavation
Danavation Technologies is laser-focused on tech solutions to the hidden inefficiencies that hold North American businesses back. Their Digital Smart Labels™ are empowering businesses to work smarter and more efficiently, facilitating sustainable growth.
In business, growing pains are real. Every company wants to expand their reach and grow their revenues, but when it comes time to scale-up, the ways of doing business that worked well at one size can quickly become restrictive, limiting, and untenable as ambitions heighten and horizons broaden. It is a challenge that businesses of every size must continually overcome, because the only alternative to growth is stagnation and bloat. But the natural predators of stagnation and bloat are efficiency and agility. And there’s one unobtrusive piece of new tech that’s driving efficiency and enabling agility in astonishing ways across Canada.
John Ricci has spent thirty years in the retail industry, watching businesses struggle to grow in the face of inefficiencies and labour-intensive processes. A diligent student of details, he found inspiration and opportunity in a seemingly innocuous, but quite universal, pain point: labelling. As the founder and CEO of Danavation Technologies Corp, today Ricci helps businesses of all sizes and stripes streamline and modernize their labelling with Digital Smart Labels™. And the follow-on effects of that targeted change are far-reaching and surprising. Surprising, at least, to everyone but Ricci.
“Dealing with labels is a time-consuming task, and you have all these really smart people who could be doing a lot more with their time to help the business grow,” explains Ricci. “Especially with the labour shortages, it’s archaic to still have staff spending hours sticking labels, worrying about printers and ink, and dealing with file management. Putting a Digital Smart Labels™ system in your store provides you a clean and efficient method of maintaining a good pricing strategy, staying competitive, and showing your customers that you mean business.”
Growing sustainably is never easy, but it becomes a lot more achievable with home-grown innovation in your court.
No business is an island
Business success is very much a social endeavour. Responsible and sustainable growth, after all, is built on an understanding with the customers and the community that your growth benefits them as well. With Digital Smart Labels™, companies are providing value to their patrons, easing shopping journeys and ensuring that pricing is fair, and engagement is high. And, even as the technology saves on labour and operational costs, it is also reducing waste and lowering the carbon footprint of the business. “Our three wins are operational efficiencies, customer engagement, and sustainability,” says Ricci. People notice these things.
As with any technology, of course, the impact of Digital Smart Labels™ lives and dies by ease-of-use. That’s why Danavation is so dedicated to ensuring that the product is as simple as possible, designed to seamlessly integrate with existing point-of-sale solutions straight out of the box. It’s a do-it-yourself set-up even the least tech-savvy can be comfortable with. But critically, that doesn’t mean you have to go it on your own.
“We’re selling a tech system, and that means being flexible and being available to support our customers 24/7,” says Ricci. “We’re always listening and looking at the pain points that are brought to us by our customers. We’re really good at collaborating with retailers and helping them figure things out, whether it’s a problem we can fix right away, or a challenge that we can help them make a plan for. One of our biggest advantages is the way we can work with our customers to get them their wish lists.”
Canadian businesses grow together
Ricci loves hearing about new business scenarios where Digital Smart Labels™ can help. More often than not, the technology is already up to the task. But, even in the most unusual applications, when Ricci gets asked if the product can do something novel, the answer is never ‘no.’ It’s ‘leave that with me and we’ll see what we can figure out.’
Therein, perhaps, lies Danavation’s greatest strength. For all that they are helping other Canadian businesses grow sustainably through the power of engagement and agility, those are also qualities they hold dear in their own operations. The Canadian business landscape is their home, and they want to see it flourish. They see the changes in how the Canadian retail environment operates, and they see those same transformations echoing through industries like hospitality and healthcare. And every time there’s a new business problem that Digital Smart Labels™ could address, Danavation looks for ways to level up their tech to solve it. Because they know that the best solution to Canadian challenges is Canadian innovation.
“We’re a Canadian company, grounded and founded in North America, and we design and engineer our own software and hardware in-house,” says Ricci. “We have our own OEM manufacturing facilities so we can control all aspects of our product. And when you deal with us, we give you one thing that no one else can give you: home field advantage.”
Growing sustainably is never easy, but it becomes a lot more achievable with home-grown innovation in your court. Canadian businesses are resilient and adaptable, and technologies like Digital Smart Labels™ open up brand new horizons of growth as we all evolve into the business landscape of tomorrow.
