About
Named for the mountain of the Muses.
Helicon is where good ideas come from. Labs is where we turn them into better software, clearer communication and stronger teams. We did it first for our own businesses.
The name
Where the spring of inspiration began.
In Greek myth, the nine Muses, goddesses of the arts and sciences, lived on Mount Helicon. Where the winged horse Pegasus struck the rock with his hoof, a spring burst out: the Hippocrene. Drink from it, and inspiration followed.
We like the story because it has both halves of what we do: the spark of a good idea, and the hard ground it has to come out of.
What we believe
Four principles.
Start with the work, not the model.
The right AI project comes from understanding how your people spend their day, not from the newest release.
Ship early, then make it solid.
A working prototype in a few weeks teaches more than months of planning. Then we harden it properly.
Keep people in the loop.
AI drafts, sorts and suggests. People decide where it matters, and every system has a clear way to step in.
Measure what changed.
Every project has a success measure agreed up front, and we report against it honestly.
Who we are
Built by an operator, not a lab coat.
Eric Shalom
Founder
Eric has spent 20 years in apparel, on both sides of the table. For 12 years he ran sales for the boys’ division of a wholesale apparel company, generating over $100M in sales across big-box, off-price, independent and e-commerce accounts.
In 2016 he founded Anchor Groupe, a Brooklyn-based e-commerce company selling licensed character apparel on Amazon, Walmart and Target Plus, and grew it to over $100M in sales on Amazon. He leads every part of it: buying, vendors, the warehouse, listings, marketing and fulfillment.
Helicon Labs grew out of the AI systems and internal software Eric built to run those businesses. He isn’t a developer by background. He built them because his team’s time was going into collecting numbers instead of acting on them.
“AI didn’t replace anyone’s job. It replaced the part of the job nobody wanted to do.”
Eric Shalom
20
years in apparel
$100M+
in wholesale sales
$100M+
in online sales