How Ogee uses Ziflow to keep every team focused on the right approvals

Email chains have a way of letting you down right when you need them most. Someone replies-all, someone else forgets to, a chain splits into two, and suddenly you’re fishing through your inbox trying to figure out whether the regulatory team ever signed off on that packaging file. Multiply that across a product line and you’ve got a tracking problem.

Sam Nantau, project manager and packaging manager at Ogee, knows the feeling. Before Ziflow, every approval ran through email. Now the whole company works out of one platform, and accountability isn’t something anyone has to chase.

Who is Ogee?

Ogee is an all-organic skincare and makeup brand based in Burlington, Vermont, with fillers all over the US. As a certified organic brand, their packaging has to clear regulatory review before anything goes to print. That means the approval process is a serious compliance requirement.

The challenge: approvals buried in email

Before Ziflow, Ogee ran everything through email. Multiple people needed to provide feedback and approval on the same files, which meant fishing through inboxes to find the latest version and confirm who had actually weighed in. Email chains got dismantled along the way, and keeping track of where a proof stood was genuinely hard.

How Ziflow brought structure to the process

The staged workflows were the immediate draw. Because Ogee is organic certified, their regulatory team and formulator need to review and approve specific parts of a proof. Creative doesn’t need to be involved in that piece at all. Ziflow lets Sam route each stage to exactly the right people, so nobody gets buried in work that falls outside their scope.

Sam also points to a few features that make the day-to-day easier. You can click between versions of a proof to see what was previously done or check whether an edit was actually made. And the markup tools let reviewers pin feedback precisely on the proof using arrows and symbols, plus built-in keywords like “replace this with this” or “remove completely.”

Then there was a discovery the team didn’t expect. Ogee originally bought Ziflow for the creative team to handle primary and secondary artwork. They recently realized they could upload videos too, which arrived at exactly the right time. With a bigger storefront presence at Nordstrom, Ogee promotes itself through video content that plays on a tablet in the Nordstrom display.

“To be able to pause and edit and comment on a specific clip in the video was very helpful. I don’t even honestly know how we would have done it.”

That opened the platform up to the marketing and digital teams, who now run the same review process for video that packaging runs for artwork.

Sam’s verdict

One word to describe Ziflow? Collaborative. Everyone is already in the platform, so there’s no alerting people or sending things to specific individuals. You leave your comment, the whole team sees it, and the work moves.

“Everyone’s in Ziflow anyway. It’s not like you’re alerting anybody or sending it to somebody specifically. The whole team can see your feedback and comment just through Ziflow.”

For Sam, the biggest shift is accountability. The record is right there, which takes the guesswork out of who did what.

“You really just have accountability when you’re using Ziflow because there’s no dancing around it. You either did it or you didn’t, which I love.”

Her bottom line: Ziflow is the best software Ogee could be using right now, and it’s proven helpful and strategic across every department, from regulatory and creative to marketing, digital, packaging, and project management.

Watch the full story

Hear Sam’s full take in the video below.

Ready to get your approvals out of your inbox?

If your review process depends on email chains that fall apart halfway through, Ziflow gives every team one place to work and a clear record of who approved what. Get a demo today and see the difference for yourself.