SWFA retained my company, Enter360, as their ad agency, but a legacy back office system was blocking growth. They used Mail Order Manager® for their back office and were forced to use SiteLINK®, Dydacomp’s proprietary ASP storefront. It was near impossible to customize, expensive to host, had terrible SEO, and crashed during migrations or during even moderate traffic. I recognized a broader market opportunity: many retailers needed a migration path out of SiteLink into an enterprise-level solution they could host on their own servers.
While my teams kept SWFA’s marketing and e-commerce operation moving, I financed a dedicated 18-month product initiative and defined the vision, business requirements, migration strategy, user experience, roadmap, budgets, and commercial model. I led the engineering and creative teams through delivery as they reverse-engineered the legacy data structure and built an ASP.NET and SQL Server platform that let retailers replace the storefront first, preserve critical back-office workflows, and migrate fully when ready.
SWFA became Umbilical’s anchor. Once launched, sales accelerated immediately, rising from roughly $67,000 per month to an early milestone of $3 million per month in a matter of months. Over the next six years, I led continued product development, turning recurring SWFA challenges into paid modules for other retailers, expanding Umbilical into a standalone product, and ultimately selling the software.
