Portland Leather Goods speeds up social media responses with AI tools

Portland Leather Goods has nearly 1 million followers across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Until this summer, the company’s five-person social media team struggled to manage and respond to a large backlog of direct messages, comments, mentions, and tags across platforms.

“All of these conversations are very fragmented,” McCoy Merkley, chief marketing officer at Portland Leather Goods, told Business Insider. He said the social team receives 70,000 messages, comments and mentions across social media platforms each month, and it typically takes up to nine hours to resolve them. In some cases, it could take up to 48 hours to process the backlog of mounts. Social media managers have switched between several software tools to get the job done.

Last year, the 11-year-old maker of handbags, wallets, passport covers and other leather goods began looking for a centralized, artificial intelligence-enabled social media tool that could unify all these conversations and responses. Merkley told Business Insider that the leader’s mission to bring more AI into business processes for leather goods manufacturers in addition to consumer staples led the Oregon-based company to work with Silicon Valley AI startup Nectar Social, which secured $10.6 million in venture capital funding in June 2025.

Merkley said the company considered multiple vendors, but chose Nectar Social because it works across a variety of social platforms and covers a variety of communication methods, including direct messages, comments, replies to Instagram Reels, and videos created by content creators of products featured in the TikTok Shop. He also liked that the platform kept humans up to date and didn’t require full automation.

Since starting its relationship with Nectar’s founders in July 2025, Merkley’s team now has access to a centralized command center to manage the brand’s multi-platform social presence and track social media conversations from a single screen, rather than switching between apps. Portland Leather Goods’ social media managers can also use Nectar’s AI to draft responses, allowing them to respond to a constant influx of users without hiring additional staff.

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Earlier this summer, Merkley asked Scarlett Stack, the company’s social media director, to rethink vendor relationships and find new ways to add more AI to the social media team’s workflow. “Looking for AI tools is a fundamental directive to the entire company,” Merkley said of the company’s 75 employees.

The company had already introduced some low-risk AI use cases, such as using Google’s Gemini to record meeting notes and help marketing departments speed up the creation of visual and copywriting assets.

In July 2025, Stack was browsing LinkedIn looking for tools to easily respond to social media conversations. Stack reached out to Nectar Social, which was co-founded by two brothers who previously worked at Meta. Misbah Uraizee is the company’s CEO, and her sister Farah is its chief technology officer.

During his four-year tenure at Meta, Misbah said he noticed that people were spending less time posting photos and videos on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and more time replying to comments and engaging with brands through direct mail. “A lot of purchasing decisions on TikTok are made in the comments section,” she told Business Insider of the thinking behind her launch.

Nectar Social will act as a community manager and help manage and facilitate these actions through data partnerships with Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, X, and most recently, Reddit in April 2026. By connecting to these social networks using APIs, Nectar’s AI can identify brand-specific conversations and track when online engagement leads to direct sales. AI can also generate reports that help you better understand how your brand is being discussed online.

In August 2025, Nectar Social launched a one-month pilot program to upload brand guidelines for Portland Leather Goods. This allows AI to create social media responses that reflect the voice and tone of your brand. For example, some companies only enter lowercase letters, while others may restrict the use of emojis. Nectar Social said this trial period will be key to training its AI to accurately handle customer questions and respond to conversations with varying tones, from enthusiasm to criticism. This pilot also helps determine when the AI ​​needs to operate autonomously and when a human review is required. The latter policy may vary by brand.

After the pilot, Merkley said the social media team fully implemented Nectar Social’s tools in September 2025. The tool scans content before the team sees it, integrates it into the dashboard, and creates initial responses and comments that are approved by the social media team, the company said.

“We’re not interested in having a team of robots come and work for us,” Merkley said.

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Merkley said typical social media response times are now a little over an hour during work hours. He added that implementing Nectar Social has helped Portland Leather Goods successfully advance its recent launch with a TikTok shop.

In March 2026, the company had a viral moment. Within 36 hours, the brand was mentioned in more than 4,000 TikTok videos, driven by content creators who earn commissions by promoting and selling products on the platform.

“Before, it was a nightmare,” Merkley said. Nectar Social allows brands to engage with consumers more quickly and answer questions in the comments section of videos, Merkley said.