Portland Leather Goods was buried in social media messages. An AI startup helped them automate the process.

Portland Leather Goods has amassed nearly one million followers across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

Until this past summer, the company’s five-person social media team struggled to manage and respond to a backlog of direct messages, comments, mentions, and tags across platforms. “All of these conversations are very fragmented,” MacCoy Merkley, the chief marketing officer at Portland Leather Goods, told Business Insider.

He said the social team received 70,000 monthly messages, comments, and mentions across social media platforms and typically took up to nine hours to resolve them.

Sometimes, it took up to 48 hours to work through the mounting backlog.

Social media managers toggled between several software tools to get the job done.

Last year, the 11-year-old manufacturer of handbags, wallets, passport covers, and other leather goods went on the hunt for a centralized, artificial intelligence-enabled social media tool that could consolidate all of these conversations and responses.

Merkley told Business Insider that a daily necessity, plus a leadership mandate to infuse more AI into the leather goods maker’s business processes, led the Oregon-based company to collaborate with the Silicon Valley AI startup Nectar Social, which secured $10.6 million in venture capital funding in June 2025.

Merkley said the company evaluated multiple vendors, but went with Nectar Social because it would work across a wide variety of social platforms and cover varied methods of communications like direct messages, comments, responses to Instagram Reels, and content creator-generated videos for products listed on TikTok Shop.

He also liked that the platform kept humans in the loop and didn’t require full automation.

Since kicking off a relationship with Nectar’s founders in July 2025, Merkley’s team has gained access to a centralized command center to manage the brand’s multi-platform social presence and track social media conversations on a single screen, rather than toggling between apps.

Portland Leather Goods’ social media managers can also use Nectar’s AI to draft responses, helping them keep up with the constant influx without hiring additional staff.

At the start of this past summer, Merkley asked Scarlett Stack, the company’s director of social media, to rethink vendor relationships and find a new way to add more AI to the social media team’s workflows. “It’s a sweeping directive for us, the whole company, to look for AI tools,” Merkley said of the company’s workforce, which totals 75.

The company had already deployed a few lower-stakes AI use cases, like using Google’s Gemini to record meeting notes and help the marketing department speed up the creation of visual and copywriting assets.

In July 2025, Stack was browsing LinkedIn in search of tools to make it easier for the company to respond to social media conversations.

Stack reached out to Nectar Social, which was co-founded by a pair of siblings who previously worked at Meta; Misbah Uraizee serves as the company’s CEO, while her sister, Farah, is the chief technology officer.

During her four-year tenure at Meta, Misbah said she observed that people were spending less time posting photos and videos on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and spending more time responding to comments or engaging with brands through DMs. “A lot of purchase decisions on TikTok are happening in the comment sections,” she told Business Insider of the thinking behind her startup.

Nectar Social acts as a community manager, helping manage and facilitate these actions through data partnerships with Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, X, and, most recently, Reddit in April 2026.

By plugging into these social networks with APIs, Nectar’s AI can identify brand-specific conversations and track when online engagement leads to a direct sale.

The AI can also generate reports to help brands better understand how they are discussed online.

In August 2025, Nectar Social launched a one-month pilot program to upload Portland Leather Goods’ brand guidelines so AI could craft social media responses that mirror the brand’s voice and tone.

For example, some companies type only lowercase, while others can be restrictive about emoji use.

Nectar Social said this pilot period is key for training AI to accurately handle customer questions and respond to different tones of conversation, ranging from enthusiasm to criticism.

The pilot also helps determine when AI should act autonomously and when it should require human review; the latter policy may differ across brands.

After the pilot, Merkley said the social media team fully deployed Nectar Social’s tools in September 2025.

He said the tool will scan content before his team sees it, consolidate it into a dashboard, and craft initial responses or comments that the social media team approves. “We are not interested in having a team of robots come in and do work for us,” Merkley said.

Typical social media response times are now a little over one hour during business operations, Merkley said.

He added that having Nectar Social in place helped Portland Leather Goods navigate its recent launch on TikTok Shops.

In March 2026, the company had a viral moment: more than 4,000 TikTok videos mentioned the brand within a 36-hour period, driven by posts from content creators who earn commissions by promoting and selling products on the platform. “Previously, that’s a nightmare,” Merkley said.

Using Nectar Social, Merkley said the brand could more rapidly engage with consumers and answer their questions in the comments section of those videos.