The company grew from success to success, and by 2011, there were 41 physical Cath Kidston shops and franchisees, selling vintage and British-influenced fashion apparel and accessories. On top of their own branded outlets, they also sold wholesale to high-end retailers like John Lewis. In 2010, a majority stake in the company was sold to private equity investors, and the company grew even further. In 2014, there were 136 Cath Kidston retail outlets all over the world.

But the last few years have been challenging for Cath Kidston, as they have for so many businesses. By early 2020, facing several commercial challenges including the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Cath Kidston closed 60 of their UK and Japanese retail locations. For most brick-and-mortar businesses, that would mean the end. But for Cath Kidston, it was a new beginning.

What made Cath Kidston’s story different? They credit their successful pivot to ecommerce – powered by Cin7 inventory management software.

Replacing an incumbent solution

Sébastien Poinçon is the Head of IT at Cath Kidston. His long list of responsibilities include evaluating third party software and maintaining the various app integrations that keep Cath Kidston’s retail business running. He oversees corporate and business systems, operations, support, network infrastructure, and store systems, and generously agreed to share with us the remarkable journey the company has been on.

After closing their physical locations, and letting the waters calm, Cath Kidston took stock, and made the decision to relaunch the brand – this time as a direct-to-consumer (D2C) ecommerce business whilst still maintaining its B2B franchise and wholesale operations.

“It was a massive shift for us, to operate on a smaller scale,” Sébastien says.

With this change in focus, Cath Kidston had to find an alternative to the complex and expensive enterprise resource planning software (ERP) they’d been using.

In addition to being costly and cumbersome, the ERP system lacked any technical documentation which made integration difficult. “It resulted in low user adoption across the organization,” Sébastien explains. “We needed a product that was more flexible and that was specifically built to support multichannel online sellers.”

He began searching for an inventory and order management solution that could help guarantee a successful transformation into a full-fledged ecommerce business – and they found it in Cin7.

Leveraging Cin7 to transform a business model

Cin7 was critical to Cath Kidston’s ability to rebound and transition into ecommerce, which today accounts for 85 percent of their sales.

After Sébastien and his team compared Cin7’s cloud-based feature set to competitor offerings, Cath Kidston implemented the software in April 2020. They chose Cin7’s powerful feature set to manage the company’s sales, inventory, and fulfillment, both for ecommerce, and in its remaining global brick-and-mortar locations. 

Cin7’s wide array of over 700 built-in integrations to other applications specific to retail and fulfillment were the secret ingredient in Cath Kidston’s remarkable transformation. “The ease with which Cin7 connects to the Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform is the most beneficial aspect of the software for us,” Sébastien says.

The move to Cin7 has also allowed the Cath Kidston team to do cross-channel stock reconciliations, making sure that the inventory count across retail, wholesale and online outlets stays consistent. Cin7 has also allowed them to connect to their main fulfillment warehouses in the UK and Hong Kong, for true end-to-end visibility.

What’s more, Cin7 has given the business something every product seller needs – a trustworthy source of inventory truth. With their previous ERP software, Cath Kidston could never be truly confident in the integrity of their inventory data.

“It was one of the major challenges we had with our previous vendor,” Sébastien explains. “But Cin7 has significantly improved our stock accuracy and has really helped us to consolidate our visibility into stock levels. Now that we have a handle on inventory management, we have seen improved process efficiencies.” 

The path to future growth

Cath Kidston’s future plans include expanding their online marketplace presence, and increasing their wholesale business to include a drop-ship model with UK retail powerhouse John Lewis. They plan to adopt additional Cin7 features such as built-in EDI connections to start selling to wholesale customers like Marks and Spencer.

Perhaps most exciting is Cath Kidston’s plans to begin opening new brick-and-mortar stores again, with Cin7’s proprietary point of sale (POS) module in use across all of their stores.

Cath Kidston’s smart approach has paid dividends. The market no longer sees them as a discount fashion retailer, and their mission to upgrade their products and offer more innovative selections has been well-received by customers. With increasing revenue, and Cin7 on their side, Cath Kidston’s future looks bright.

“Cin7 has really helped us,“ says Sébastien.

Don’t miss out on the extraordinary inventory visibility and increased efficiency that Cin7 brings — schedule a demo today with one of our experienced sales consultants.

“My brother was a passionate musician, and we had this idea to create a one-stop-shop where you could buy an instrument, learn to play it, perform, even record, all under the one roof,”  Richard says. 

He and his brother looked everywhere for businesses following a similar approach, but couldn’t find many overseas, and there were none at all in Australia. 

“We asked why, and the music stores said, ‘We know nothing about running a lessons business,’ and the music schools said ‘We know nothing about running a retail store.’ But we were stupid enough to try to do both at once,” Richard chuckles. “For our sins, we broke all the rules.” 

If they’d have known better, they might have never started. But 12 years and “a hell of a lot of mistakes,” later Big Music is still here, and the business keeps the brothers busy. They have over 800 students come in for music lessons in the Big Music studios, they have 30 music teachers working six or seven days a week, teaching children and adults, and they’ve got a music product business that sells both online and in their Sydney street-front retail premises. 

Prior to 2020, the business had matured and was running well — and everyone knows what happened next. 

Covid pause causes pandemonium 

The Covid-19 pandemic laid waste to many retail businesses. Lockdowns hit first, then when rules relaxed, the ongoing pandemic saw people understandably reluctant to return to packed stores. But, for many product companies, the slump in foot traffic was more than made up for by a surge in eCommerce. Companies that were in a place to take advantage of the conditions often did more thriving than mere surviving. 

“Prior to Covid, our eCommerce business was around 25 percent of total sales,” Richard says. “And now… it’s hard to tell because it’s still settling down, but I think it’ll end up being more like 35 to 40 percent.” 

The music business has some unique caveats that makes online selling potentially problematic. It’s not like, for example, a shoe shop, where products tend to be similarly priced. Music products have a huge price range — something as simple as a guitar pick can be picked up for less than $2, whereas a custom Fender Stratocaster guitar can sell for more than $10,000. Some purchases are impulse buys, where others are much more considered, like buying a car. 

“So our sales people are sometimes like a checkout person at a grocery store, and other times they’re like a car salesperson,” Richard says. 

“We needed to find systems that could handle both — allow us to have a certain volume of very small transactions, where there’s not a big customer relationship component, and then maybe half a dozen times a day there’s going to a much more considered transaction where we could be giving people quotes, they’re going away and thinking about it, and then when they purchase you’re adding on all this other stuff and bundling it.” 

Big Music had long used an inventory management system called Lightspeed to handle Big Music’s unique requirements. Over the years, they’d customized it to fit the business, and their staff were all used to it. But with the increase in their eCommerce sales volume, and the modernization and cloud trend in the business software landscape, they found themselves outgrowing Lightspeed. 

When Lightspeed announced it was winding down, Big Music needed something bigger and better, and to implement it, they turned to the people who’d helped them get Lightspeed up and running over a decade ago — SMB Consultants. 

Time for a tune-up

Richard had known Jeff and Peter at SMB before Big Music even existed, so he knew they were the sort of people who’d be able to help them implement an inventory system that was just right for Big Music. He’d taken note of business software trends, where systems are built to do one thing well — like Xero for accounting — but also have open APIs and software endpoints that allow different apps to share data and talk with each other. 

“You now have this modular approach, where you take the best apps and put them together to give you a customized solution,” Richard says. “And Jeff and his team had worked that out a long time before a lot of other people did. They’ve now helped hundreds of businesses navigate down that particular pathway, and that’s a profound change from 10 or 12 years ago where you chose one system that would do everything.” 

A decade ago, Big Music had settled for just such an approach. They ran the business on Lightspeed and MYOB, both of which were run out of a server on-premises. “It was costing us a lot of money to maintain a server room, have network consultants come out and maintain the servers, do backups, and that sort of stuff. And it didn’t make sense given the whole world’s been moving to the cloud, and I figured we could save some money if we did too,” Richard says. 

However, the process of changing business-critical software can be fraught. Without the right solution and a well-planned implementation, there can be significant adverse business impacts. SMB Consultants knows this very well, which is why they have a careful, staged approach to recommending software, and implementing it. 

“With any Lightspeed client, the software is so heavily ingrained in the business. It’s like their operating system, and that means change management really comes into it, because the staff will be used to the Lightspeed way of doing things,” says Jeff Atizado, co-founder of SMB Consultants. “As a business owner myself, there’s got to be careful consideration going through the process, understanding the workflows, understanding the options, and making informed decisions as you go.” 

Richard agrees. “They’re big projects, and an awful lot can go wrong. That’s why working with a mob like SMB was so critical — as soon as they were engaged, my confidence level that we could do a good job improved dramatically.” 

With the right experts brought on board to help, Big Music was ready for a new approach — choosing a cloud-powered app stack to act as a fully-bespoke ERP, with a single app at its core, acting as a sole source of truth. For this, they chose Cin7. 

Singing from the same song sheet

When Big Music made the move to Cin7, they also opted to switch from desktop-based MYOB to online accounting with Xero. They wanted their move to the cloud to be complete, with all the benefits that being cloud-based entails. Inventory data was cleaned up and carefully moved from Lightspeed into Cin7, and the same process took place from MYOB to Xero. This meant that vital historical data was kept intact, and helped maintain business continuity across the transition. 

With the implementation is complete across all of Big Music’s different software packages, the difference is night and day. 

“The integration between Cin7 and Xero has been a significant enabler of a whole bunch of improvements,” Richard says. “The first is that our server room has been decommissioned, and I don’t have to spend as much money or worry about supporting that infrastructure. That’s been a blessing in itself. Not only that, but Lightspeed was holding us back, because it won’t run on certain operating systems.” 

Now that the business is running on modern cloud technology, Big Music is able to be completely up-to-date with operating systems and security patches. “Our whole environment is safer and more secure than before,” Richard says. “Uptime has been over 99 percent.” 

Big Music are using Cin7’s built-in Point Of Sale capability for all their in-store transactions, and it’s been working seamlessly. The near instant sync with inventory means they always know exactly how much product they have to hand, so customers aren’t kept waiting. 

“The POS system works fine!” Richard says. “When you’re putting through dozens and dozens of little transactions each day, the POS system handles that beautifully. And the guys in the shop reckon it’s actually easier to use.” 

Because of the high disparity in musical product pricing, Richard’s staff have to be jacks-of-all-trades, working the retail floor one moment, then negotiating a high-value purchase. Big Music is an all-in-one location, with the retail storefront, and a warehouse up back, plus studios and other areas for learning and recording. Both retail and online orders are fulfilled from the same warehouse. The website is built on Shopify, and the team uses Starshipit for fulfillment. 

“Our guys jump between the POS system and the backend,” Richard says. “When you’re selling a $10,000 guitar you’ve got to get into discussions about discounts and margins and all of that information is in Cin7, but it hasn’t been an issue for my team to navigate between that and the POS.” 

Richard also cites the cloud capability of Cin7 as having extended his access to the business — even when staff are offsite. “Cin7 was particularly handy during COVID,” he says. “Without it, we’d have been stuffed. Our operations and warehouse manager wasn’t able to physically come into work, but he could log on from home every day and do his job in Cin7, from home.” 

With Cin7 in the cloud, the back-office can be anywhere 

The new system has also created a better work-life balance for back-office staff. “Cin7 enables a more flexible approach to our workforce,” Richard says. “Our bookkeeper Diane moved cities a few months ago, and she didn’t have to resign or anything, because she can access Cin7 and Xero from Brisbane, just as well as she can operate from here. That’s the future, isn’t it? That wouldn’t have been possible in the old Lightspeed and MYOB world.”  

As the business owner, Richard says the system has allowed more oversight while reducing the amount of time he needs to spend poring over reports.  “I love the fact I can login from home on a Saturday or Sunday evening, and see how the store’s been trading during the day,” he says. “Having the real-time information available from anywhere is great for me.” 

For Big Music’s bookkeeper (working from another city!) the level of data available has been a revelation. The depth of the integration has also removed a lot of manual effort, with operations staff all getting more data and working more efficiently than before. 

 “Cin7’s integration with Xero means that our bookkeeper can get a lot more information, down to the product level, when doing things like supplier reconciliations,” Richard says. “That information never existed in MYOB, so that makes her job a hell of a lot easier. I also love the pivot table functionality in Cin7 reporting, and I use that quite a lot when I’m doing analysis. It’s a lot nicer to be able to do it natively in Cin7, rather than exporting and doing it in Excel.” 

Stock-taking and inventory reconciliation is a song with Cin7

Stock-taking — the perennial bugbear of any retailer — has been made much, much easier thanks to Cin7. “It used to drive me insane because the Lightspeed stock-take module was buggy, and not transparent. By contrast, going through the stock-take process in Cin7 is much easier to manage, because you can break it down into components, and execute a section or a brand or a range of things at a time.” 

The difference between then and now, when it comes to stock-take, is night and day. In fact, it’s an entire weekend’s worth of days. The Big Music team used to have to do a store-wide stock take once a year, but now they can do a rolling inventory reconciliation that doesn’t require shutting down for a day or more, or coming in on a weekend. “We had to do a massive store-wide stock-take once a year, which everyone hated,” Richard says. “We don’t have to do that anymore.” 

Furthermore, Cin7 has made the process of taking sales orders and converting them to purchase orders much easier. A lot of Big Music’s online orders are for items they don’t actually stock in their own warehouse. Cin7 has enabled drop-shipping, even for very complex or expensive orders. “We can knock the purchase order conversion very quickly and seamlessly,” Richard says. 

Everything working together in harmony

For businesses considering adopting a cloud inventory management solution, Richard is happy to recommend Cin7 — but he’s adamant that the process is much easier all around when you’ve got expert help. 

“I’ll go so far to say, well, I cannot imagine having got through this project any other way and without the help of these two blokes and the rest of their team,” Richard says. “Don’t try and do it yourself.  I think that SMB have got a unique set of skills and a deep understanding, and we needed it.” 

Now that Cin7 serves as Big Music’s source of truth and center of operations, things have never been better. “It works. It’s a good, reliable platform. It connects well with other apps, and you’re future-proofing your business by taking this kind of modular ecosystem approach,” Richard says. 

After a long trial with other, less able inventory management apps, Bill Rendell and Heritage Building found a happy home in Cin7

Heritage Building has a long, storied history. When former accountant Bill Rendell first bought the business, it was simply a supplier of recycled timber, and it was doing pretty well on that basis. 

But Bill had the foresight to start selling other building materials, like doors, windows, light fittings, bathroomware — “You name it,” says Bill. “We set ourselves up to be the one-stop-shop for the heritage building industry, and started selling equivalent-new reproductions as well.”

This transformation happened fairly early in the business’s story, and at first Bill used MYOB and spreadsheets to manage the complex inventory requirements of a second-hand goods business, where nearly every item sold was in some way unique. Unfortunately, it didn’t work very well. “With MYOB, there was no accountability for stock. It was just like a big box that you chucked all the information in — but I didn’t think there was anything better around at the time.” 

After struggling with MYOB for almost nine years, Bill turned to what was then a new business in the very new industry of cloud software implementation and coaching — SMB Consultants. 

SMB founder Jeff Atizado and his team helped set Heritage Building up with his first inventory management solution: Lightspeed. At the time, it was best-of-breed software, and the new fully-digital way of operating was revelatory for Bill’s business. But times change. The second-hand market was becoming less and less viable, and growth was stymied by the need to keep on top of manual tasks and fixing errors. “We were doing nothing but fixing stuff-ups,” Bill says. 

The problem, Bill says, was that Lightspeed hadn’t moved fast enough to keep up with the rest of the rapidly-changing world of online business. 

“It’s very difficult to get Lightspeed to work with Shopify,” says Bill. “We couldn’t get the shipping set up the way we wanted it. It just wasn’t possible with that program.

He turned to his trusted advisors to help turn things around.  “I started speaking with Jeff about using Cin7. The more I heard about it, the more I was impressed with what it could do.” 

SMB lends a hand for the second time

“It was interesting for us, because even though Bill had been a customer for eight years, the second time around is an excellent opportunity to re-evaluate their requirements and build a solution that incorporates what is important to them today. It simply isn’t just a process of replacing old with new. Businesses grow and change and you need to take the time to understand what are the new objectives,” says Jeff Atizado. 

Since their first engagement with Heritage Buildings, SMB Consultants have developed a process to deeply understand the business they’re working with. How is the business changing? How has it evolved? And where does it want to go? 

Together, Bill and the SMB team found that a new software solution could help him exit the secondhand goods market altogether, while growing his business in entirely new directions. 

“That process at the beginning of the project, to understand how we were working, was critical,” Bill says. “Back when we first started with SMB and Lightspeed, that process didn’t exist! Doing the scoping showed me an entirely different SMB, and following the process all the way through to implement Cin7 has proved it out. They understood what we needed, and made sure it happened.” 

After the initial consultation, SMB Consultants used Cin7 to create a working proof-of-concept, to introduce Heritage Buildings to new workflows and opportunities offered by the software. Once the proof-of-concept was finalized, SMB worked with Bill and his team to implement the full project. 

Building back better on a strong foundation

Today, Bill has transformed his business from one that physically stored and moved a lot of second-hand goods to a modern, just-in-time purchasing model that doesn’t require carrying a lot of stock. This shift, SMB says, simply wouldn’t have been possible without Cin7. 

“Some big wins from Cin7 have been being able to give Bill a tool that allows him to track which items need to be ordered, and that allows him to keep track of online sales, to order quickly, and get them shipped in time,” Jeff says. “One one side, the purchasing, on the other, fulfillment.” 

Under the old system, it took up to two or three weeks for Heritage Building to get goods to their customers. But now they can get goods into customer hands in less than a week. Cin7’s ability to support a dropshipping model has enabled Heritage Building to reduce its total stock holding by a factor of more than four, with a huge accompanying reduction in administration requirements while improving shipping times.  

“Our stock holding at present is about 200,000. Our stock holding was 1.5 million with half the turnover we’re doing now , and we’re doing it better. We’ve basically reinvented ourselves from the ground up, and we’re now a very viable online shop as well,” Bill says. 

“With shipping, what we’ve achieved now was beyond anything we could conceive. We’ve reduced our turnaround time for orders from about two weeks per item, down to three to five days.”

Soon, with new shipping workflows they’re looking to create with SMB in Cin7, he reckons they’ll be able to use Cin7 to make shipping even faster. 

“One of the things we’re doing now is looking to integrate with his dropship fulfillment provider, so we can streamline how quickly we can get orders from them, which will again cut down the amount of time it takes to get the product into a customer’s hands,”  Jeff says. 

As well as pivoting from second-hand goods to a thriving multichannel business selling new materials, Cin7 has allowed Bill to branch out with a hot new sideline — selling fireplaces. 

“It’s going gangbusters,” Bill says. “Again, that’s because of the website, and the website is because of Cin7.” Having a modern inventory app like Cin7 as their foundation means that it’s easy to sync with best-of-breed ecommerce apps like Shopify. 

“We’ve basically got a direct connection between Cin7 and Shopify,” Bill says. “We can move the products back and forwards, we can adjust counts. No drama. No chance of an error. That’s brilliant.” 

“We can plug a lot of apps into Cin7. Lightspeed couldn’t do that.” 

“A winning combination” 

Heritage Building, SMB Consultants, and Cin7 have been a winning combination. Anytime he’s needed help, SMB has been there for support. Bill has his own specialist implementation partner at SMB, Jess, who’s helped all through the scoping and setup, and can now lend a hand whenever Bill needs it. “I’ve still got Jessica there, when I need her, whether it’s a big or a little thing. You can’t hire for that — well, I don’t think you can,” Bill says. 

Likewise, Jeff says that their work with Heritage Buildings is a great showcase of how beneficial it can be for businesses to have a long-time software and coaching partner – for both parties. 

“It’s been a pleasure working with Bill,” Jeff says. “It’s great being able to look back and see the changes that we’ve made. I think Bill is being a bit humble, knowing how much change he’s actually made, but when you look at how much inventory and overhead he’s reduced, while increasing sales — that’s a winning recipe. It’s been great to be able to grow together.” 

Heritage Buildings had great results the first time they worked with SMB, but the second time around, with the transformation powered by Cin7, things are better by an order of magnitude. 

“The difference between two years ago and now — it’s almost unrecognizable,” Bill says. “I can work anywhere I need to be. For me, that’s a lot of help.” 

The new efficiencies offered by an inventory solution that connects seamlessly with other business-critical apps have paid enormous dividends for the business. After 17 years in business, growth has been unlocked. 

“In the past two years, we’ve doubled our business,” Bill says. “We’ve gone from an average of about 250,000 per month to about half a million per month. And about half of that growth is our online shop. We’ve been increasing turnover every month for the last two years, and we’re now the number three distributor in our category in Australia.” 

None of it would have been possible without Cin7 — and the help they’ve received from SMB Consultants. 

“Without Cin7, it would have been impossible to do what we’ve achieved,” Bill says. “It’s that simple. We are who we are today because of Cin7 and SMB Consultants. Our website is going exceptionally well, and I don’t think it would have been possible before Cin7. It’s worked very well for us.” 

The company’s founding idea was incredibly simple: to merge the concept of a compact, quick-dry travel towel with a nice, big, bright, colorful beach towel. Since then, they’ve had an incredible journey. It began with launching sales via Amazon and their own website, and — having barely reached the milestone of their first million in revenue — they had a lucrative layover at the Dragons’ Den, the UK’s cut-throat equivalent of Shark Tank.

“We had a nice little head-start in 2017 when we were on Dragons’ Den in the UK,” Ben says. “One of the dragons, Deborah Meaden, took us under their wing. It’s been a really good experience, to take the business from an idea into a bit of a startup.” 

The quick wins from the Dragons’ Den appearance was a huge hit of exposure to worldwide audiences via the popular TV show. “That brand awareness gave us a real head-start to moving forward as a business, as well as some goalposts to aim for, as we expanded around the world,” Ben says. “And when we took on Deborah as an investor, she made us more accountable — we weren’t just doing a little side-project anymore, we had to be professional and respectable. It was a good kick up the bum to take things seriously and do things properly.”

One of those kicks up the bum? Dock & Bay needed to get a grip on their inventory. You could perhaps say that the problem was they didn’t know where their towels were — and they needed to find out. 

Poor inventory management almost made Dock & Bay throw in the towel 

“Inventory management was the most horrible part of our existence, for the entire business,” Ben says. “It was always a challenge. In the past, our warehouse owned the source of truth for inventory, and they put their numbers into our eCommerce platform. What that meant was, essentially, we didn’t have any control over what we were selling.” 

Tired of using spreadsheets as a temporary fix, Dock & Bay team went shopping for an inventory management solution. Their main pain points were simple: inventory visibility, and an inability to do stock forecasting. “We didn’t have control over what inventory we had listed, because the systems around us seemed to be controlling what we were selling. The most we’d managed was Band-Aid fixes to our eCommerce platform.” 

The Dock & Bay team needed help, from somebody who knew how inventory management worked and what the best systems were, and could help them get their system implementation right the first time. They found exactly what they were looking for in SMB Consultants. 

SMB Consultants are Cin7 Experts. Their job is to help their clients find the best solution to grow and manage their businesses, and once that solution has been found, they work to seamlessly implement it. The foundation of their success is having a careful process that they go through with all their clients — first seeking to understand how the company is working, what the pain points are, and what changes need to be made to optimize operations. 

“We originally reached out to SMB to say ‘We’ve got a problem,’” Ben says. “We knew there were a lot of inventory management programs around — TradeGecko, DEAR Systems, Cin7, and so forth. We said, ‘We don’t know which one would be best, but in general, each of these seems to do something like what we need.’” 

Through a collaborative, in-depth scoping process, SMB helped Dock & Bay land on Cin7. 

“SMB helped us throughout,” Ben says. “The first step was to understand how we’re operating now, and SMB have a really good view of how business operates, the challenges that businesses face, and how those solutions fit into software. When we first started talking, it wasn’t just “here’s what Cin7 does and why you should use it and we’ll install it for you” — instead, they understood the business and the challenges it faced, and they could pinpoint why Cin7 was the best solution.” 

What clinched it for Cin7, Ben says, is the advanced level of integration Cin7 offers with Amazon. “It’s quite advanced compared to every other software available. All software has its own strengths and weaknesses, but Cin7 was the most well-rounded, best approach for us. SMB coached us, and their Cin7 expertise helped us understand how to implement our workflows in Cin7, and then train up our teams.” 

The towel company that always knows where their inventory is 

Dock & Bay have been with Cin7 for over a year, and a lot has changed. 

One of the main differences is that the Dock & Bay team has fantastic inventory visibility, and confidence in their data. They no longer have to manually update convoluted, unreliable spreadsheets. Reporting is reliable, and gives decision-makers access to up-to-the-minute sales and operations information. 

“The amount of data we’d have to deal with would break a spreadsheet,” Ben says. “But that’s where Cin7 comes in — we have trust in the data. And that’s the most important thing, because if you don’t trust your information, you can’t trust any reporting you try to get out of it. Cin7 gives us faith in our data, and automates the process of running reports, so we can make informed decisions.” 

Cin7 now acts as the source of truth for inventory information across all the apps and platforms that Dock & Bay make use of. Sales made on Amazon and Shopify stores all pull from availability data in Cin7, and the software also looks after the routing of products in and out of their third-party logistics (3PL) warehouses. 

Dock & Bay has five warehouses run by 3PL partners, one for each region they’re selling in — the UK, Canada, the US, Europe, and Australia. They also work with Amazon fulfillment in each of those regions, for a total of 10 warehouses across the business. On top of this, they also have different Shopify websites for either B2B or direct-to-consumer (D2C) sales for each region, in addition to third-party marketplaces like The Iconic and Nordstrom selling their products. This geographically disparate, multi-channel picture would be a near-impossible nightmare to manage, if not for Cin7. 

“Cin7 manages the inventory in all of those warehouses,” Ben says. “It knows how many open orders there are, and that gives you your available stock. Every time an order takes place on one of our sales channels, it comes to Cin7, which knows it needs to update the other sales channels and say ‘You can’t sell this item any more.’” 

Having this level of control means that Dock & Bay have been able to set up some routing rules, which simply wasn’t possible before Cin7. 

“For instance, we can prevent orders going straight to the warehouse if it’s a pre-order, or if the customer hasn’t paid or is using an alternative payment method, we can set up some rules to make sure those orders don’t go out straight away — we can put in a delay of say, two hours. Being able to control that workflow really saves us a lot of time, hassle, and ultimately costs.” 

Scaling up safely & sanely

Having Cin7 on their side has also given Dock & Bay something crucial: the ability to scale up safely. “Once a business hits a particular size”, Ben says, “a level of trust necessarily comes into the operations, as it’s impossible for any one person or team to check everything that happens. And if your system isn’t trustworthy, things can spiral out of control very quickly.” 

“You need to trust that things are happening the way you want them to, without human intervention. Cin7 gives us the ability to create rules and automations to run the business, rather than having people do all those steps,” Ben says. “Cin7 has allowed us to grow with confidence.” 

The high level of trust in their systems has been repaid with smooth operations, even over periods that typically give product companies nightmares. The Black Friday sales rush is awaited with dread anticipation by operations in the eCommerce world, with floods of consumers testing system integrity across the board. In the past, it’s been a huge bugbear for Dock & Bay. This time around, ready for anything, Ben told the support team they could call him anytime, 24/7. In the end, though, it wasn’t needed. Thanks to Cin7, Dock & Bay’s Black Friday went off without a hitch.

“In the past we had chaos, leading to weeks and weeks of issue resolution,” Ben says. “But this Black Friday we had no issues, because for the first time we had control of our data in all of our systems, and had the process down pat. I really do, 100 percent, put that down to the fact we’ve taken control of our business processes, and Cin7 is key to that.” 

Customer service is now a snap

A further benefit of the Cin7 implementation has been a sharp reduction in customer service issues. Thanks to a much clearer view of inventory and more control over stock, the classic eCommerce bugbear of overselling has been almost eliminated. 

“It’s reduced the number of customer service issues significantly,” Ben says. “Because we now own the information, and the process around it, we’re not overselling like we used to. The second thing is we now have a very valuable source of truth to look into where things may have gone wrong. In the past, we couldn’t really pinpoint where the issue was. Whereas now, we can analyze what happened in Cin7 and then identify where the issue is, and often even fix it ourselves.” 

Ben gives a typical example of the sort of trouble they’d often face before Cin7 was implemented. If the warehouse system they were previously relying on was reporting incorrect numbers, Dock & Bay had no option but to remove the product from the website altogether. Now, they can simply adjust the stock figure in Cin7 or put a hold on the item, and that will stop the product selling across all sales channels. “Now, we can solve the problem and get on with business. That’s where Cin7’s helping us.” 

Dock & Bay say that Cin7 has also saved them needing to expand the operations team. But that doesn’t mean skimping on hiring, or firing employees. Instead, they can run an efficient, high-performing, lean operation, and increase headcount in areas that will help grow the brand. 

“Because we have trust in the process and the data that’s flowing through Cin7, we don’t have to intervene very often. This means our operations team can run pretty slim, and we can invest in roles like marketing and sales that add more value to the business. We’re just much more efficient,” Ben says.  

Cin7 is Dock & Bay’s heart of gold and single source of truth

With the Cin7 implementation over a year behind them, Dock & Bay have a clear view of exactly how much being helped by a trusted Cin7 expert has benefited the company. The impact, Ben says, is absolutely huge, to the point where he says they “couldn’t have done it alone.” 

To other businesses considering implementing Cin7, Ben says that if you’re going to be using a platform that controls so much of your business, you may as well do it properly, and get a certified Cin7 expert like SMB Consultants to help. 

“SMB Consultants brought the dream to life. Having Cin7 has meant we could become more efficient, and trust the information in our systems. But we couldn’t have done that without SMB. We had to work with the right people as well as the right system to get where we are today.” 

It’s safe to say that knowing exactly where their towels are has made Dock & Bay a much better business than they were before. It might seem improbable, but having Cin7 at the heart of the company makes everything possible. 

“Cin7 is the heart of our business,” Ben says. “It controls what we sell, and where we sell it. It manages information from customers, through the warehouse, through our supply chain, into our accounting system, and all the way around our operations and support team. It touches every part of the business. We take all our trusted information from Cin7, and it’s our single source of truth.” 

“We’d be very lost and very sad without Cin7, because there’s really no way to visualize how the business could operate without it.” 

Lenny is CEO of ModaConcrete | TerraFlame, a brand he acquired from a private equity firm a few years ago. 

“We bought a brand, and essentially built a factory and set up a supply chain in Baja, Mexico to produce our products,” Lenny explains. “We adapted a factory that was set up to produce architectural precast and tooled up production to manufacture the most popular TerraFlame products. Later, we reintroduced the precast production as an online business supplying architectural precast to the trade. We now have two brands: ModaConcrete and TerraFlame coming out of the same factory, serving two divergent but complimentary markets.” 

“TerraFlame,” Lenny says, “is the leader in clean-burning gel fuels, and fuel burning appliances. Our Pure Gel Fuel is the ‘razor blade’ which is available in select retail stores, online retail and through our subscription plan. You basically pop our fire fuel can into our fire bowl or fireplace and enjoy. Each TerraFlame fuel can generate 3 hours of warm, ambient , golden flame for about three hours and costs about $6. And they are food safe, which makes them perfect for Smores.” 

ModaConcrete, on the other hand, sells architectural precast concrete products that are designed to create fashionable and beautiful hardscape environments, sold and fulfilled factory direct to trade and design / build channels. 

The TerraFlame brand designs and markets clever consumer products, while ModaConcrete overlaps from home owner to the trade. Both brands produce great products, but the real innovation is in what Lenny has done to grow the company by a truly astonishing margin in the two short years.

“The key is to build a capable and scalable systems foundation as early as possible”, he says, “a functional ERP for supply chain, manufacturing and inventory management.” Tying it all together is Cin7. 

Cracking the cool consumables market without going up in smoke

When Lenny bought the company, it had a couple of “really cool” products that were getting good traction in retail. But, beneath the surface, big cracks had formed. 

The products might have been good, but revenue was nowhere near the level they’d expected it to be. It was difficult to fully understand the true product and operating costs with little visibility between manufacturing and fulfillment. Compounding the problem was that the operations were in a very raw state.  Before Cin7, the company didn’t really have any inventory management — not even the basics. 

“There were no systems,” Lenny says. “It was napkins and spreadsheets and nobody knew what was going on operationally. They were looking at things without understanding the true cost of goods, because they really had no way of doing that. And filling more orders, means throwing man hours towards more manual entry. None of it was scalable.” 

ModaConcrete and TerraFlame needed to find a hard fix — fast. And from previous experience, Lenny  knew exactly what they needed. The only problem was that the kinds of ERP systems he’d worked with prior required significant time and capital resources, a huge investment for a company at this early stage.  

“We needed to find some kind of effective ERP system that we could use to not only manage our inventory and manufacturing, but also integrate our EDI and forecasting,” Lenny says.  

They considered a few other options — Lenny’s previous company had run a substantial NetSuite instance, with its own internal development group. But being new and running on a relative shoestring, the company didn’t have the time or budget to support that kind of deployment. Eventually, his search led him to Cin7. 

“When we found Cin7, and started seeing the capabilities and features, we were very surprised and impressed with the functionality and the breadth of what the system could do.”  

Today, ModaConcrete and TerraFlame are using Cin7 from the beginning to the end of the product journey — and it all starts with manufacturing. 

ModaConcrete has a solid foundation in Cin7

About 60 percent of ModaConcrete and TerraFlame’s business is products that they manufacture in-house, so visibility is critical. And before Cin7, “it was Quickbooks and spreadsheets,” Lenny says. “People would eyeball everything from mix design to sell through and that was it. There was no inventory control, no BOM management or production management, no raw material tracking, nothing” 

To manage the manufacturing, ModaConcrete and TerraFlame are using the Bill of Materials (BOM) functionality of Cin7. 

“We’ll design a new product, test it, create 3D models of it, develop the mold set, then it’s on to filling, casting and finishing the parts,” Lenny says. “We have several product types and about a dozen different concrete mix designs, depending what the products are for — and we set up those mix designs as BOMs in our system.” 

Essentially, every raw material that goes into making a new product is measured and tracked in Cin7 via the Bill of Materials. When the raw materials are combined into a product, that too is tracked in Cin7, where the new product can be added to inventory even as the materials used to make it are subtracted. This simplified manufacturing process management is standard in the Cin7 software. 

ModaConcrete is also making use of Cin7’s Made to Order functionality. One of their bigger sales channels is B2B sales direct to trade stores, construction companies, and job sites. Customers can visit ModaConcrete.com and select from a range of products, sizes, shapes, and colors.

This order information goes into Cin7, which tells the manufacturing operation exactly what to produce. Behind the scenes, ModaConcrete has ‘blanks’ ready to be modified into the exact items the customer wants, and once items are finished and shipped, the customer gets notified that their order is on the way. No matter whether a customer is big or small, Made to Order means they get exactly what they’re after, every time.

“Understanding Cin7 Made to Order has enabled us to build up preliminary stock to convert into finished goods a lot faster than trying to make them from scratch every time,” Lenny says.  

For a manufacturer, operating with this level of inventory control has huge advantages. Material costs can be carefully managed, and forecasting requirements gets vastly easier. Operations know where everything is, how fast it’s being used up, and when products will be ready to be sold. Manual inventory tracking tasks are reduced, and relieved of operational overhead, staff can get on with the job of actually making and shipping products. 

For ModaConcrete and TerraFlame, this was an increase in visibility by many orders of magnitude. Now, they have a clear understanding of costs from manufacturing to finished goods to shipping. “Now you can see what your true cost is, and based on that, you can make intelligent decisions on what you’re going to do,” Lenny says. 

Native EDI unlocks the freedom to scale

The other big item on Lenny’s agenda was EDI. First created in the 1960s, Electronic Data Interchange is a technology that allows the automated, computer-to-computer exchange of business information. It might be old, but it’s still one of the most-spoken languages of business — and if a company can’t speak it, it’s missing out. 

Cin7 is one of very few inventory management systems with native EDI integration capability, and it’s the secret weapon that’s allowed ModaConcrete and TerraFlame to grow as rapidly as they have, with their wares now available in all the biggest US retail outlets, including Target, Costco, Williams Sonoma, Amazon and more. It’s been a huge leap for the company, compared to how things were done before. 

“When we bought the company, we were barely doing 300 orders a week over multiple platforms, and as you can imagine, everything was manual,” Lenny says. “Every order required at least four manual touches. Staff had to download the order from each partner portal, enter it into Quickbooks, enter it into the warehouse ship requests, manually create the label, and then enter shipment tracking back into the portal, to close out the order process. The previous thinking was that scale required more people to work faster and harder to keep up with the paper pushing.” 

But all that was about to change. Once the company implemented Cin7, integrated ShipStation, and set up barcode scanning and labeling at the factory, things got much more efficient. They had a better system, instead of trying to make a broken system work harder. And after activating Cin7’s EDI capability, things went to another level again. 

‘I’d say that we multiplied our throughput by seven times. Specifically the same small team that struggled to supply 300 orders per week, can comfortably handle up to 2000 orders per week today,” Lenny says, casually. “And now we’ve got that EDI rolling, we won’t bring on a customer unless they’re EDI capable and integrated with our system. We rarely accept non-EDI integrations or orders.” 

It’s a bold step, but it’s one that puts them head and shoulders above similarly-sized product companies — and on the same playing field as the biggest companies in the United States.

“There’s not a lot of companies with less than $10 million in revenue requiring EDI compliance with their trading partners in order to drop ship for them, just because most of them don’t have those capabilities,” Lenny says. “But it’s these capabilities that are most important, because they give us the ability to scale. I think that’s the most important thing that came from Cin7.” 

Right now, ModaConcrete and TerraFlame are managing 16 EDI connections, end to end, in Cin7. They’re managing Costco, Wayfair, Lowes, Home Depot, all the major Internet retailers, as well as some brick and mortar retailers. They’re also managing inventory in four different locations, across two different product lines, and two direct to consumer websites, as well as a third party Amazon presence. It’s all being done with Cin7. 

“It gives us the ability to operate on the level of a much bigger, more capable company, despite being a small operation,” Lenny says. “We have a 10 person team in-house in Southern California where we do sales, marketing, and web strategy. And we have 60 people at our factory in Tecate. Cin7 enables that 10 person team to look and operate as a much more sophisticated company, when it comes to our trading partners.”

AMF Magnetics is an Australian company that specializes in selling permanent — or “rare earth” — magnets. They’re now the largest supplier in Australia, with a range of something like 1500 products” 

“It’s a very niche product, but it’s needed by all segments of society in one facet or another,” says Mark Kapo, owner of AMF. “ We’re very fortunate that we’re in this space.” 

Mark wasn’t always in the magnet market. Before AMF, he owned restaurants. But after ten years in the hospitality industry, he wanted to try working on something less intensive. “We wanted a business that didn’t operate on the weekend, and was closed over the Christmas break.” Mark says. This, he reckons, made the rare-earth magnet business particularly attractive. 

AMF was an established business that had been running since the early 1980s, when Mark bought it in 2006. Back then, it was very much an “analog outfit,” as Mark puts it. 

“I’m from the analog era. I’m old school. But I decided that we had to push the online side of things — we were running blind. It wasn’t easy to decide what to do.” Mark’s desire for a digital transformation was complicated by the fact that the magnet business was inherently complex. AMF supplies all kinds of customers — from enormous B2B orders of hundreds of thousands of items, to specialist medical equipment with extremely high quality requirements and tight deadlines, to casual D2C customers who just want some magnets to play with. On the supply side, there are multiple suppliers in several different locations. And the complexity grows even greater with AMF’s uncompromising approach to customer service. 

“We deal with everyone equally, and we take it pretty seriously. Being from a family that’s very hospitable, service is important to me. That’s not just a word, it’s not made up. We actually do care. If the customer’s not happy, we’re not happy, and that attitude just runs through the whole business.” 

Over seven years, Mark managed to grow the business, but he found that inefficient operational processes were holding things back. They had managed to digitize to some extent, and were working with MYOB desktop software to manage inventory and accounting — but they found it wasn’t up to the task. 

“We had MYOB, and we deal in multi-currencies, and frankly, MYOB’s management was too slow to go into the cloud and work with multi-currencies. That really held us back,” Mark says. 

“But all that said, I was very comfortable with it, and it’s pretty scary transitioning from a system that you know, to one that you don’t know how to navigate.” 

Even though he didn’t know for sure what the business needed in terms of its digital transformation, Mark knew how to find out. He made two particularly smart choices: hiring an exceptionally talented in-house marketing and IT team with modern software skills, including a new Marketing Manager (later CEO) — and working with external experts, including SMB Consultants. 

The right hire can fire up your business

As the CEO of AMF Magnetics, Catalina Rodríguez is responsible for every aspect of business’ day-to-day operations. With an impressive resume including Deloitte Colombia, Catalina says she didn’t know much about the magnet business to start with. 

“Before joining AMF I didn’t know that almost everything in this world had magnets — airpods, doors, medical devices, cars, speakers and even the superhero costumes in Marvel movies!” Catalina says.

But after sticking around a bit, Catalina learned quickly. She led a crack squad of developers, IT professionals, customer service team members, and external consultants to get AMF running as well as it possibly could, and one of the main steps she took was building a team to transition the business from MYOB to Xero. 

With Xero as the accounting system of record, things were already running more smoothly across much of the business, with one exception: inventory management. Xero, by design, is not inventory management software, and Catalina and Mark both knew that to really power up the business they’d need to couple Xero’s powerful accounting capabilities with a best-of-breed inventory management solution.

To find the right one, they turned to SMB Consultants, who recommended Cin7 after an in-depth scoping session where they took time to understand AMF’s particular business requirements. 

“AMF were using a server-based system called FileMaker before they came to us,” says Deepak Stevens, an integration expert at SMB Consultants. “Our job was to understand their needs, and recommend a platform that would set them up for the next ten years at least. It was quite clear that Cin7 would be a good fit for AMF Magnetics, because we were confident the system would be able to adapt to any specific needs they have.”

After the initial scoping session, SMB Consultants put together a proof-of-concept — Cin7 running to AMF’s specific requirements. 

“SMB advised us that Cin7 was a perfect fit for where we wanted to take the business in the future,” Mark says. “We wanted to optimize email marketing, social media, and paid advertising, and we needed our websites to work at their very best in order to do that. And we needed the inventory system live and helping us with the accounting side of things. Cin7 covered a multitude of these areas, which other systems we looked at didn’t do.” 

Working with the SMB team, Catalina and the AMF team hit on a hybrid solution. Together with another consultant out of Sydney, they integrated Cin7 with Xero, and built a custom integration between Cin7 and Shopify that suits AMFs diverse customer base and specific operational requirements. Thanks to SMB’s expert guidance, and the understanding gained through the interactive proof-of-concept, all the moving parts fit together seamlessly. 

“When we did Cin7, I was a bit scared. It was going to be a big change. But to be honest, the transition was very easy,” Catalina says. “The proof-of-concept was really good, because it helped us mitigate the risks, and showed us the impact the new platform would have for the business. It was done on a weekend, and in one or two days, we were operating.” 

For the founders of Urth, formerly known as Gobe, a road trip from California to Patagonia was the impetus to create change — by giving more people the opportunity to experience nature for themselves. 

The products that support this mission are varied; Urth makes products, grouped together loosely into the categories “Art, Carry, and Camera,” that help their customers either spend more time in nature with their cameras, or engage with nature-inspired art. In addition to sourcing environmentally friendly products and materials, and creating products that can be used for a lifetime, all purchases from Urth are offset against the carbon emissions they create, as well as helping fund communities to plant trees.

“Urth creates products that support creativity,“ says co-founder Chris Gooley. ”We started off in the photography niche, but are expanding out into all different forms of art and artistic pursuits.“

Today, Chris Gooley continues as one of Urth’s directors, and his focus is on operations and finance. “It’s eight years later now, and things are going pretty well. We’re selling all over the world, and we’ve got a strong customer base.”

To get to this point, Urth needed strong systems on which they could build their vision. And before Cin7 and SMB Consultants, those foundations were looking a bit shaky.

“Cin7 is the way to go” 

Urth was already a well-established ecommerce business by the time they found Cin7, and started working with SMB Consultants. Before then, they’d been running both their ecommerce and inventory through ecommerce platform Magento. While many product sellers (including Cin7 customers) find Magento an excellent platform for ecommerce, it’s not intended to work as a full-fledged inventory management system. However, it’s still often used as one. Many product sellers start out using spreadsheets, accounting software, or their ecommerce platform to manage inventory, and while this often works for small sales volumes, it can be a big impediment to operating efficiently at scale.

For Urth, this problem was compounded by the fact they were already running inventory out of Fulfillment By Amazon – and Magento and Amazon weren’t talking.

“We were running inventory with Magento, so there were a lot of manual updates,” Chris remembers. “Magento could really only deal with recovering inventory by unit sold. It couldn’t do inbound shipment updates, adjust for stock variances, et cetera. We’d have to upload our website orders to the fulfillment centers manually. It was a pretty inefficient system, to say the least.”

This, in addition to being incredibly time-consuming, led to a host of further issues, the biggest of which was customers being able to place orders for items that were actually out of stock. It also limited Urth’s capacity for further growth, with expansion to new markets or sales channels made all but impossible.

“It caused enormous headaches, and a poor customer experience,” Chris says. Fixing mis-ships took “a lot of back and forth emails, offering different products as replacements, and dealing with – well, not necessarily irate, but definitely upset customers. And manually uploading our orders to the fulfillment centers was always a nightmare, and very time-consuming. And our opportunity for expansion was limited as well. It had a pretty stifling effect.“

In 2020, the Urth team made a decision – they’d move off Magento and on to Shopify. To do this, they worked with a web development agency called Process Creative, who suggested they find an inventory management system that integrated natively with Shopify and Amazon FBA – and they recommended SMB Consultants to help them do it.

“They said, look, if you’re going to make the Shopify website work efficiently and you want to make room for expansion, then Cin7 is the way to go,” Chris says. “So we did our own research, and came to the same conclusion. And we’re glad that we also followed their advice of getting SMB Consultants to talk us through that process and set it all up.”

If you want to change the world, you need to plan it

When SMB Consultants were brought in to bring Cin7 to Urth, they found themselves faced with a formidable set of requirements. For international tax and compliance reasons, they would need to implement two instances of Cin7 (one to take care of APAC and US sales, and another for the UK and Europe) as well as multiple sales channels and fulfillment centers.

Together, SMB Consultants and Urth worked to identify two key objectives for the implementation: an accurate inventory valuation, and understanding of the cost of goods sold (COGS.) With that baseline, automations could be put in place to massively increase the business’ efficiency, as well as ease of management.

“Urth was already a successful, growing business, so the main thing for us was working together with a good client, to come up with a good solution that everyone is happy with,” says Jeffrey Atizado, CEO and co-founder of SMB Consultants.

With key inventory data safe in Cin7 and syncing seamlessly between Urth’s Shopify stores and Xero accounts, the task for Deepak Stevens, SMB Consultants’ resident Cin7 expert, was to implement Cin7’s powerful automations, taking away the time spent on admin work.

“Our scope was to set Urth up so they could focus more on the business – on sales, customer service, and all that good stuff,” Deepak says. “The really cool thing for us at SMB, is that this was probably the first account where we utilized the full potential of Cin7’s automation functionality.”

Making Urth’s products available anywhere on Earth

Properly implemented, Cin7 has incredible automation capability. Urth already had a great starting point, with the lion’s share of their inventory and fulfillment coming out of Amazon FBA. “Urth’s setup is very clever in the way that all the stock is in FBA,” Deepak says. “So they already had a world-class fulfillment center using Amazon services. Our task was to connect Cin7 to Amazon in the best way possible, to make sure fulfillment works anywhere Urth wants to sell.”

A critical component of Urth’s mission to inspire customers to get out in nature is to support them no matter where they live in the world. They wanted to be able to ship their products to anyone, regardless of location. With very few exceptions, that’s exactly what Cin7 has enabled them to do.

“One of the most unique things with Cin7 is the option for us to route orders by delivery country,” Deepak says. SMB Consultants have set up a Cin7 automation that, no matter where an order comes from, routes to the appropriate FBA fulfillment location. It all happens automatically, without any need for intervention from Urth’s staff.

“Once we had that up and running we were completely automated,“ Deepak says. ”Without any admin work, orders are placed, sent to Amazon, fulfilled, and the tracking code goes back to the customer on Shopify.“

Urth are now utilizing a Singapore-based 3PL warehousing facility called IMF to expand their reach even further. “IMF holds stock for Urth to fulfill to countries that Amazon might not do,” Deepak says. “Then we created an even more complex routing table in Cin7 that, for all of the countries that Amazon excludes, we can push those orders to IMF to fulfill those countries automatically.”

The expanded reach and time saved by these automations have cleared the ground necessary for Urth to expand their operations. As the business has developed, SMB and Cin7 have kept pace with requirements, adding layers of functionality to ship to more countries and add new channels, in the form of online marketplaces. Urth now sells through eBay, France’s Fnac, Worten in Portugal, OnBy, BestBuy, eMag – and Cin7’s new partnership with supply chain automation software Synqware is opening the door to even more.

“Ordinarily, that would be a huge effort,” Deepak says. “We would have to hire a developer, get an API sorted, then go through that whole song and dance of setting up a new integration. I think Urth is really unique in that they’re offering fulfillment to almost everywhere. Normally, you see product sellers restricted to one or two regions, but Urth is now one of the few businesses that can really utilize Amazon’s warehouses plus their own 3PLs, and basically cover anywhere they want. It’s really exciting to see.”

Peace of mind: priceless

All of this complexity could cause terrible headaches come tax compliance time, but Cin7 has Urth covered. Chris says that Cin7’s smooth accounting workflow with Xero is a huge advantage, which is made even better with advice from Joy, SMB Consultants’ in-house accountant. Cin7’s native reporting functionality has also proved invaluable to Urth’s leadership, with the ability to provide breakdowns on profitability by region, or product category.

“That has been really insightful,“ Chris says. ”For Cin7 to give the live gross profit reporting per product group, and for each country, has been fantastic.“

Being able to get accurate profit and loss reports at the end of each month means Urth have been able to better invest back into the business. “We’ve been able to actually assign meaningful budgets to things like product development, our marketing budget, hiring budget,” Chris says. “All these things are now accurate and meaningful rather than speculative.”

According to Urth, the capability provided by Cin7 – and SMB’s help in taking advantage of it – is “priceless.” They simply could not have tackled it by themselves. Instead, adding SMB’s insight and advice to Cin7 has saved them having to hire back-office or development staff.

“It’s such a high stakes part of the business,“ Chris says. “For an e-commerce site, you need to be showing inventory in the marketplace, you need to be able to fulfill it. Whenever we’ve had any issues, Deepak has got onto it straight away. Cin7 has given us not only peace of mind, but a platform for expansion. It’s happened so quickly and yeah, it has made a huge difference. It’s been fantastic.”

“Cin7 has proven to be the best inventory solution “

For product sellers who are looking to expand their geographic or channel footprint, Urth say that Cin7 is by far the best option – and they also recommend getting a partner to help make Cin7 work to its full capability right across the business.

“If you really do have a global mindset for your business, then Cin7 is a great option,” Chris says. “That has been reiterated in the last few months with our expansion into this whole other world of e-commerce, selling both B2C and B2B.”

Cin7 is the platform for their success, but SMB Consultants’ help is what’s enabled them to get the most out of its extensive capabilities. “As for using SMB, or another partner, I think you definitely do want someone to help you set it all up correctly in the first place,” Chris says. “There’s too much at stake to get your setup wrong. But we’ve been able to push forward with huge peace of mind, and fantastic ongoing support.”

Chris’s elevator pitch for other product sellers looking for an IMS is simple: you need a one-stop inventory solution that connects to other best-of-breed apps for product sellers.

“To have one central inventory management system that’s also connected with Xero takes away a lot of stress. Shopify, Amazon, Xero, and Cin7 – it’s all in the same tight loop. Cin7 has proven to be the best inventory solution out of all the other options on the market, and the most affordable.”

“When we started having kids, our lives became very busy, and the world of ecommerce was growing quite rapidly,” Aaron says. “We didn’t have time to go to stores, or shop during store hours. We did all of our shopping — everything from baby supplies to clothes — online, and we were just enraptured by this world.” 

When the two decided to move back to Kerryn’s home country, Australia, they decided to start a new, ecommerce-focused fashion business. Australia, they say, wasn’t quite as advanced as the US at ecommerce at the time, but they knew it would catch up. 

“We wanted to create a really simple, one-stop shop for cool boho-chic fashion accessories, starting with scarves and ponchos. Then jewelry was something we sort of dipped our toes into and really quite enjoyed it.” 

Aaron and Kerryn figured that a fashion accessory and jewelry company could afford them a lifestyle where they were able to travel to destinations like India, Indonesia and Thailand, and enjoy beaches and sight-seeing while they met their manufacturers and toured factories. It’d also enable them to give back to the world, as well as conducting business according to their personal values — all of Arms of Eve’s jewellery is handcrafted and ethically sourced. 

They set up a Shopify store, and began experimenting with selling fashion accessories at weekend markets. Kerryn would wake up early, put up a pop-up store and, as she sold, worked to understand her customers, what they were looking for, and how they were wearing the jewelry. This in-real-life interaction helped them get a feel for what their online customers wanted, and the care and attention to detail they lavished on customers helped score them their first big break, when they were approached by Australian ecommerce marketplace The Iconic. 

“They legitimized us in the marketplace as a ‘real brand,’” Aaron says. Soon, they were selling on high-profile online marketplaces like the UK’s Wolf & Badger, and Revolve Clothing in the US, as well as in-person and online. 

Arms of Eve’s growth plans were working like a charm, but there was one sticking point: their inventory management. 

Growing pains require a better fit 

“We were growing really rapidly. We had our own Shopify site, we were on The Iconic and a few other marketplaces, and keeping track of stock was such a sore point,” Aaron says. “We were doing it manually on spreadsheets.”  

Aaron knew that to sustain and increase growth, Arms of Eve needed two things – a solid inventory management system, and the right team to help them use it to its full potential. 

To do this, they turned to Cin7, and Halkin Business Partners. 

Helped by Halkin

Halkin Business Partners is a business consultancy who’ve been helping entrepreneurs and business owners scale for over 20 years, and they serve businesses of all sizes, from startups to established enterprises. A Xero platinum partner with thousands of clients and a wide-reaching consulting network, Halkin have offices all over the world, and specialize in an outsourced services model across accounting, tax compliance, strategic advisory, HR and technology.

“We have a strong foundation in numbers and accounting work, which is where we originated as a business,” says Adam Wakerman, Halkin Director. “But, at the end of the day, accounting systems are repositories of data and information, and our ability to provide clients with accurate financials and provide insights based on those, is the product of the data that actually goes into the system.” 

It was with this attitude around data that Halkin began their foray into not just consulting, but operational consultancy and management. This involves, Halkin say, taking a holistic view of business, its systems and processes, and being able to understand how all those systems link together for the purpose of ensuring data integrity. Simply: if you can measure accurately, you can manage better. 

“We’re able to plug in with the founders and work directly with them across not just the accounting or bookkeeping work but also across their systems, their processes, their structure, and their HR, and then also obviously their CFO related requirements,” Adam says. 

Aaron met with the Halkin team, who zeroed in on Arms of Eve’s inventory management processes. 

“They said, ‘You need to organize this. You need to understand the value of stock that you’re holding. And if the Iconic sells something, and Shopify sells something, how are you dealing with taking that stock off inventory? And how does it work with Xero?’” Aaron says.

“And we just shrugged our shoulders. We had no idea,” he adds. 

After Halkin did their initial assessment of Arms of Eve, they recommended Cin7 for their inventory management. Initially, Aaron was resistant. 

“We thought Cin7 would be really great, but we were scared initially because for a small growing business, it was a big deal. But Halkin backed that decision to such a degree that they actually fronted the money to pay for it. They said ‘You’ve got to go with Cin7, we’ll front it, and you’ll pay it off slowly as you continue to scale, but this is what you need.’”

Halkin says that, for them, helping clients upfront with their inventory software to help remove some ‘sticker shock” isn’t that unusual. When they know that Cin7 will really help a customer, they’ll do whatever they can to help them make the move. 

Aaron is full of praise for how Halkin helped Arms of Eve switch to Cin7. 

“Our financial team at Halkin have Cin7 experts on board, and they’ve really helped us integrate the software into the business,” Aaron says. Halkin have even gone so far as to create a custom tool that alerts Aaron to any money sitting in open invoices. If he needs any support, he can choose from a financial and software support team that includes a bookkeeper, a virtual CFO, a tax advisor, and a whole Cin7 team. 

“Before and after implementation, we’re always looking to improve the process, and the business as a whole,” says Diego. “We know that we have the big picture, so after the implementation when a customer needs help, we know their process, and why they’re asking.” 

Cin7 runs rings around the competition

“I just don’t know how we operated before Cin7 and Halkin, to be honest,” says Aaron. “Before, inventory management would literally keep me up at night, because I knew we were selling stock we didn’t have – and you don’t want to do that.” 

Since implementing Cin7 with Halkin, things have changed dramatically for Arms of Eve. Cin7 now sits at the center of their business. Everything connects, including their multiple Shopify stores, marketplaces like The Iconic, their accounting software Xero, and Starshipit, which they use for all their fulfilment. 

“The ‘before’ picture was scary as hell,” Aaron says. “But the ‘after’ picture — Cin7 is the hub, the all-important beating heart of the business. In terms of connecting all our inventory, it really makes things significantly easier, and transparent. In the days where we didn’t have that, it’s just hard to fathom how we operated.” 

Now, with Cin7, the Arms of Eve team know their stock levels at the touch of a button. They better understand how to service the business, and their customers, by understanding what is selling well, or what is running out of stock. They’ve been able to streamline their order processes from end-to-end, which is a “huge time saver.” 

“The reporting and data through Cin7 just makes it really easy to understand,” Aaron says. “All of our customers, all of our suppliers, everything’s in there. It’s like a one-stop shop. It’s become a huge time-saver, and time is money” 

Armed with data, the business innovates

One of the best things about Cin7 is the way that it democratizes information and data at Arms of Eve. Everyone in the business has access to Cin7, and it’s an invaluable tool for all stakeholders to understand what’s going where, when.  

“Our wholesale manager needs to understand stock levels, and needs to be able to write order fulfilment. There’s different people who are touching it at different points. I think that’s one of the most brilliant aspects for us – I don’t know how we would have done this without Cin7.” 

This data democratization has made it easy for Arms of Eve to innovate in their product categories. They’ve created combinations of products for sale called “stacks” and “sets.” Stacks are all about styling; Kerryn, who is a designer, wanted for customers to be able to purchase several items from one category that all look great together. “I want people to say, ‘I want that great-looking bracelet. You have four bracelets and they look so good together. How would I go about getting that?’ So we’ve created bracelet stacks, necklace stacks, earring stacks.” 

Sets, on the other hand, are across categories — for example, a combination of different pieces of jewelry that all look good together, like rings, necklaces, bracelets. Cin7 has enabled this innovative product bundling by allowing the creation of ‘virtual stock’ in the Bill of Materials. The software looks at the different SKUs available in inventory, and then allows stacks and sets to be built accordingly, limiting the number of virtual products that can be created by the inventory count.

“Let’s say you have 50 of two kinds of jewellery, but only 10 of another kind. The software will only allow you to make 10 stacks,” Aaron says. “Virtual stock was for us a Eureka moment. We can manage it really successfully, because when we sell a stack, it takes three individual items out of inventory to create it. With Cin7’s BOMs, we keep our inventory really neat, tidy and organized.” 

With the Covid-19 pandemic making travel difficult or impossible, Arms of Eve has also had to change how it approaches suppliers and quality control. In the old days, before 2020, they could easily travel to meet suppliers, but now it all happens via WhatsApp. Kerryn designs and mocks up in Photoshop, the factories create samples and share pictures, and then Arms of Eve has all the information it needs to know if they want to enter production. Here, too, Cin7 has helped. 

“Before Cin7, we weren’t really tracking those purchase orders, but now they’re coming through, and they’re the first item that gets ingested into Cin7. We’re creating new products in Cin7, we’re putting our costs in, when it arrives, it’s marked as arrived. The inventory’s now in our system, which is great.” 

Cin7 even allows Arms of Eve to track any inventory they’ve gifted to influencers, who can then choose to show off their products.

Embracing Cin7, wholesale 

In addition to their ecommerce channel, Arms of Eve are also using Cin7 to handle wholesale. While they don’t specialize in selling to small boutique shops, when they are approached by someone who wants to sell their products, it’s easy to set up with Cin7. 

“When a wholesale order comes in, the sales order is written in Cin7,” Aaron says. “The inventory’s taken out, the wholesale costs are in there, Cin7 speaks to all our dispatch and everything.”

Dealing with smaller boutiques and lesser-known customers can be risky for a business like Arms of Eve, but Cin7 enables them to process payment instantly, with strict cash-on-demand terms. 

“Wholesale payment is often handled through the Stripe account connected to Cin7,” Aaron says. “I think we’re about 50/50 in terms of people doing bank transfers, and people hitting the ‘pay now’ button in Cin7.” 

“The big wins are efficiency and transparency” 

Halkin says that the customers they put on to Cin7 frequently see enormous business benefits. It’s certainly been true for Arms of Eve. 

“Arms of Eve now have transparency with their stock numbers, so they can make decisions. They’ve gained efficiency as well. Stuff that used to take hours to reconcile, now takes a couple of minutes. The main gains are the transparency of the financials, being able to make decisions, and understanding the big picture.” 

For Aaron, looking back to where they were before they adopted Cin7, their decision is a “no-brainer.” 

“Cin7 is really adaptable. It’s really smart. It does all the heavy lifting really seamlessly, and it’ll just save you headaches. For us, it’s a no-brainer, looking back. You know when they say, hindsight is 20/20, well if we hadn’t done this, our business wouldn’t be where it is today.” 

Before Halkin helped him on to Cin7, Aaron says that he “hadn’t even realised that software like this existed.”

“When you think about what I understand about the business now, and how everything plugs in — well, back then I didn’t even understand what needed to be plugged where. If I could go back in time, I’d draw a diagram and put Cin7 in the centre,” Aaron says. “Everything plugs into Cin7.”

Diego from Halkin says this centralization of complex inventory functions is the exact use case that Cin7 is built for, and it’s these cases where they don’t hesitate to prescribe Cin7. 

“It’s holistic and robust in terms of connecting to ecommerce, having EDI connectivity, having 3PL, logistics, and accounting connectivity as well,” Diego says. “A lot of competitor software has some of those things, but not all, so the fact that Cin7 also has APIs and the ability to connect with other vendors in the ecosystem is a big advantage.”  

With Cin7 in place and running smoothly, and with Halkin on side to provide business, financial and software integration advice, Aaron says the future is bright for Arms of Eve. 

“Now we’ve built an ecosystem that is running really smoothly on Cin7. It’s eureka —  this is the future, this is the map.”

“It’s changed our whole operation and gave us that visibility,” she says, adding that the recent success wouldn’t have been possible without Cin7. “If I didn’t have a solution like this I don’t think we would have seen what we have right now.”

Pine Apparel founder Michael Edwards started the company by selling dresses out of his car. But, years later, he continued to view the company as a “small business”, despite shipping apparel orders to boutiques throughout the United States.The systems in place before Cin7 reflected this mindset: Inventory was recorded on Excel sheets, and entire processes were recorded in Google Drive. Sales were manually deducted when they happened and then, as Elise says, “the team would rush”.

“They’d actually go and look for [the stock in the warehouse] because it wasn’t organized. And they just knew [one thing] was in the third aisle, and something else was in the eighth aisle…”

When Elise first joined the team in 2019, she was tasked with “bringing the company into the current century.” After finding better ways to organize the warehouse, the team’s inventory and accounting systems were the next major step. In previous roles, Elise had integrated big ERP systems like SAP, so she knew exactly what she was doing. The only problem was that she didn’t know what sort of inventory solution would best suit the business.

“The big challenge was, how do I find a software solution? It wasn’t only having inventory management, but we knew it had to tie into our financials. We knew we had to tie it into shipping. We knew in the end we wanted to also have an e-commerce site. So, the number one focus was starting with the end in mind.”

“I’ve got my one source of truth with Cin7”

Elise ultimately chose Cin7 over competitors for a number of reasons – the ability to work with Shopify, the seamless functionality with often-specialized apparel industry requirements and, as Elise admits, the all-important number on the back page of any proposal – the price. It’s a decision she hasn’t regretted.

“I love the journey that we’ve had with Cin7,” she says. “I love that we’ve got my one source of truth with Cin7. I’ve never had to question it, because it’s always been spot on with the integrity of our inventory.”

For an apparel wholesaler, that trust in inventory systems is vital. And it can be a tricky industry in that sense. Items are sold generally as bundles, but single stock items also need to be recorded. The same item will have a range of colors and sizes, and even one kink in the chain can bring sales to a halt. This is where Cin7 has saved significant stress and heartache for Elise. For the first time, she now has complete trust in their inventory and systems. And she knows what’s available, in real time, across all systems and platforms.

Looking back before Cin7, Elise says the difference is substantial. The company signed a contract with Cin7 in January 2020. Before that, she says she was flying blind in terms of accurate stock counts.

“I had no idea what my inventory was,” she says. “It was the first time in 36 years that we actually went through the warehouse and counted item by item to know what we own.”

Cin7 onboarding program was “a lifesaver”

Despite her complete faith in the systems and the data Cin7 provides, Elise found herself switching to Cin7 at an especially difficult time. She had initially hoped to go live with Cin7 by Superbowl Sunday, but not long before that day the Warehouse Manager resigned, leaving Elise to organise and fill in over 50,000 inventory data points. Then, Pine Apparel’s sales slowed considerably when COVID-19 hit the US in March 2020. Despite all of this, Elise says what impressed her and made the transition stress-free was the “hand-holding” and onboarding provided by the Cin7 team.

Elise says the team were still there through the set-up to answer questions and help make the transition easier – something that other systems didn’t really accommodate.

“I think in terms of the onboarding and then that implementation, that hand-holding was what was so important,” she says. “A company like SAP – they don’t offer service like that.”

And ultimately, that’s what won Elise over.

“I just think all of that – [the help with] onboarding and the implementation and then ultimately having Premium Plus support is really one of the keys to our success.”

Integrity across all platforms takes the anxiety away

Elise says Cin7 has made Pine Apparel’s growth manageable and simple for two reasons: It’s reliable, and provides true visibility right across the business.

“I have confidence in our numbers,” she says. “It’s really just the integrity. I have the real time data – with our goods going to Shopify, and then a Shopify order coming back in real time showing our inventory and what’s available to sell.”

Pine Apparel makes use of Xero, Shipstation and Shopify Cin7 integrations, and the entire team has access to and utilizes the software daily – everyone from Sales Reps to accounting and warehouse staff. So having total faith in the accuracy of data is vital to the success of the company.

“That’s what our whole strength is, it is that I’ve got that one source and I know it connects,” says Elise. “If I look at Xero, I see the same number in Xero that came from Cin7. I look at Shopify in that sales order and I see that here, I go to ShipStation and I see that same order. I’m not seeing different data.”

Cin7 means product sellers can sleep at night

“That’s what makes you sleep at night,” Elise says.

Confidence in numbers is imperative to the smooth running of an organisation that sells direct to boutiques all across the United States. In the wholesale industry, items are sold as bundles, rather than one-offs. And Sales Reps are selling to various boutiques across the country. It’s important to have a clear and precise indication of available stock in real time. This is why Cin7 has made life so much easier for this business. The visibility allows Elise and her team to have real-time, accurate sales and inventory data, and they’re able to react to it.

Ultimately, what it comes down to for Elise is the fact that Cin7 has seamlessly integrated with the company and unlocked its growth. Where she was once unable to keep track of what was selling and what was in stock, she can now know immediately what’s on hand – what sells quickly and what is popular right now. These things allow her to keep on track with orders and demand. And perhaps more importantly, she can trust what she sees.

And finally, what does the implementation of Cin7 mean for Elise and Pine Apparel?

“We can make money,” Elise says. “Why are you in business? You’re in business to make money, not just because you love to sell clothes to people.”

Cin7, she says, has enabled the business to get past its struggle with problems arising from the Covid-19 pandemic, bring on more staff, and even increase its pre-pandemic sales numbers.

“Before the year is half over, we’ll have recorded sales over our 2019 numbers, which is a huge victory,” Elise says. “So that’s a major acceleration.”