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ApparelMagic helps Dromedaris give their wholesale accounts a sophisticated eCom experience

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It’s no secret that eCommerce has been fashion’s fastest growing sales channel. But that boom hasn’t just come on the consumer end—retail stores are now asking for easier ways to buy.

We’re well past the days of sending excel spreadsheets back and forth, and innovative fashion businesses like the footwear brand Dromedaris have begun selling to their wholesale accounts via sophisticated B2B stores that take all the friction out of making the sale.

Dromedaris, winner of our B2B Store Showcase award, has a beautiful wholesale store they built using ApparelMagic’s new B2B ecommerce platform.

We spoke to Amanda Malis of Dromedaris about how changing technology and expectations combined with the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic led Malis and her team to launch online wholesale.

“B2B actually came at a really great time,” Malis says. “Our retail customers aren’t seeing our products in person.”

The challenge became how to get their footwear—cool, statement-making boots for women—in front of buyers without physically being in the same room. Other approaches worked for a time, but a more permanent solution was needed.

“We had physical catalogs at one point,” Malis says. “but now everything can be in our B2B site.”

The new Dromedaris wholesale site gives retailers everything they need to put together assortments for their stores.

“They are able to view our catalogs, stock levels and prices, access marketing material, administrative documents and customer reviews for buying guidance, as well as complete orders at their own convenience.”

It’s a streamlined experience for the customers, and even from the brand side, they’ve seen an immediate benefit of orders rolling in with less friction.

“They used to have to either email or call us,” Malis says. “It’s helped a lot with our customer service, because I don’t have to take as many calls or emails. Customers can put their orders in themselves.”

It goes without saying though that even for a wholesale customer, the eCommerce experience has to be top-notch to make that sale. Using the visual style the brand is known for, the Dromedaris B2B store has the same panache as their direct-to-consumer shopping experience. Lifestyle imagery and polished product shots pop off the screen. It’s significantly livelier than a fax or spreadsheet.

“We were able to design the store to resemble our B2C store, which is important for our branding strategy,” Malis says.

The retailers, for their part, are thrilled. They get their orders faster, and can shop the B2B store just like they are shopping for themselves, browsing and adding items to their cart as they go.

“When I talk to my retailers on the phone and tell them about it, they’re excited that they don’t have to wait to hear back from me if we have stock,” Malis says. “The site has brought us many efficiencies and even improved sales due to the wonderful shopping experience it provides.”

In addition to a high quality experience, Dromedaris has been able to implement new sales strategies using the B2B store’s intuitive page-building tools.

“When we have items that are closed out with only a couple items left, it was really hard to get the retailers to know that,” Malis says, “So we created a part on the site that’s called ‘Outlet’ where we promote special offers to the retailers where they can get a great deal on an assortment of shoes.”

Fresh ideas and new implementations of technology are key to running the modern fashion brand, and after building such a successful eCommerce experience for retailers, Malis has high hopes for how Dromedaris will approach the future:

“Not only has the B2B store helped us to transition smoothly into a digital era, but it has allowed us to help our retail customers do the same. We hope to continue to improve and grow using this platform.”

JMP The Label is our Startup of the Year – Less Excel and more expansion

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Launching in March 2021 wouldn’t be an auspicious start for most businesses, but Juliette Porter’s JMP The Label is a striking exception. The influencer, MTV’s Siesta Key star, and now fashion mogul built a swimwear brand when most businesses were treading water.

Porter has been the one to watch, being named the Emerging Fashion Influencer of the Year at the American Influencer Awards in 2021. Pairing Porter’s taste and natural affinity with the beach with the skills of fashion industry veterans, JMP The Label is no merch line: it’s a well thought out lifestyle brand.

We spoke to JMP The Label co-founder David Kelleher about the business’s success using ApparelMagic.

“ApparelMagic has allowed us to expand rapidly, while maintaining control of inventory, BOMs, vendor information, and details necessary to stay organized with our 1600 skus—and growing!” Kelleher says.

It wasn’t always this easy though. Like many fashion brands, they hit a bump in the road early on when their commercial success was outpacing growth on the backend of the business.

“Prior to switching over, our information was maintained with various Excel documents, and human error plays such a factor with Excel,” Kelleher says.

By identifying their pain points right away, the team was able to start looking for a solution before any errors started to affect the business.

“Because of the fact that we saw success with sales early on, and that we knew that we wanted to continue to design more styles with more fabrics,” Kelleher says, “we were going to need something that was more robust than Excel. We needed an ERP system, and the sooner we could get to it, the better.”

With the goalposts identified, the next challenge was to find the best system for their needs. Though with a reputation that preceded it, a winner soon became clear.

“We knew we needed to move to an ERP system. We met with a bunch of them, and ApparelMagic seemed to be the industry leader,” Kelleher says.

They moved their business operations to the ApparelMagic platform for its ability to manage everything in one accurate, central hub.

“Trying to figure out how to build a brand on the backend as we scaled: that’s where we saw the worth of the software.”

As a brand that communicates directly with its customers, being able to connect to an eCommerce service was paramount. JMP The Label built a Shopify store using a standard integration between it and ApparelMagic, effortlessly syncing product and order data back and forth.

“The integration into Shopify was so simple, and now that we are able to generate reports on sales, styles, and leftover inventory,” Kelleher says, “2022 is poised to be a great year.”

Now that JMP The Label has the software power behind the scenes, they can concentrate on taking advantage of their growing popularity. As they grow, they know ApparelMagic will continue to support them with new features.

“ApparelMagic is the leader in the industry, and we can’t wait to see where the next few years can take us!”

Learn more about JMP The Label here.

Calder Carmel is ApparelMagic’s 2020 Most Promising Startup

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Mark Calder is no rookie in the menswear game. From stock boy for a haberdasher to creative director of a luxury menswear brand, he has spent decades refining his craft and distilling it into the perfect luxury sport shirts.

In 2018, he put his years of experience center stage when he launched his own shirting line, Calder Carmel, with his merchandising and production manager Kristina Stuckenbrock.

The driving force of the brand isn’t anything new, but it’s something far too hard to find in today’s market.

“The quality will last you forever,” Stuckenbrock says. “We buy from the same mills as top Italian brands, and we use the highest quality fabrics and materials.”

And as if that Italian quality isn’t enough, the design too is special, using exclusively-designed fabrics, unlike the competition, most of whom buy a mill’s collection as-is.

This attention to detail is making a mark. Just two years in business, and they’ve already sold almost 20,000 shirts! The real secret to their success though goes back to the basics: forming positive, sustainable relationships.

“We’re partnering with the best retailers across the United States,” Stuckenbrock says. “Some of them have been in business for a hundred years. They really know their customer.”

And that knowledge is key. Calder’s business strategy is to let retailers do what they do best and provide them with the best products possible, showing real loyalty in the process.

“We really believe in partnering with our customers to sell our product,” Stuckenbrock says. “We’ve taken the position that we don’t want to sell online because we don’t want to compete with our customers.”

While direct-to-consumer sales are many brands’ preferred pivot, this one has its own strategy that precisely suits its market.

“We’ve taken the approach that if we partner with our customers, we’re hoping to gain more market share within their stores because they know we’re not going to be coming up with a fifty-percent-off sale in the middle of November.”

That loyalty goes both ways, and already men are learning about the brand from their favorite specialty stores and becoming repeat customers.

“What’s really exciting is when we hear about how customers in store are reacting to it.” Stuckenbrock says. “We have some dedicated Calder customers now that they call on anytime our shirts arrive!”

Even during 2020’s retail struggles, Calder Carmel worked with their retailers to help them get through a difficult time. Whether it was sending them extra collection photos they could use promoting online, extending payment terms, or shifting delivery dates.

And you know what? It’s worked out. Customers reported their best sell-through numbers this past Fall, even with reduced foot traffic, and some styles even had to be reordered from factories—during a pandemic!

“For this terrible year, we had a positive end to it,” Stuckenbrock says. “We’re confident that we’re going to be able to get back to where we were and see some more increases.”

Alongside their dedicated relationships with retailers and mills, Calder Carmel has been powered by ApparelMagic. For a small team of two, it’s an essential service to get work done efficiently and accurately.

“ApparelMagic helps me do the work of ten people, really,” Stuckenbrock says. “What a gamechanger it’s been for us to easily access information so quickly. We don’t have time to be sorting through Excel documents all the time. When I get a call from a customer, I can tell them what our inventory is.”

And for an era when what can go wrong will go wrong, ApparelMagic has a whole suite of tools to keep businesses on track.

“Without ApparelMagic, we would not be able to instantly report on overdue invoices, upcoming payables, and the many pending orders in the system that remain to be filled,” Stuckenbrock says. “It is truly a lifeline that I am very grateful to have!”

Lola & Sophie wins the 2020 ApparelMagic Growth Award

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With retailers closing down, some for lockdowns and others permanently, fashion brands have had to regroup and rethink their efforts in record time. The businesses who are best set up for success, like ApparelMagic client Lola & Sophie, have completely recalibrated their businesses as we enter a new era.

For Lola & Sophie founder and designer Gene Kagan, it starts with asking the big questions.

“How do we reach our end consumer?” Kagan remembers wondering at the onset of the pandemic and the industry’s mounting retail woes.

For a womenswear brand doing the vast majority of business through wholesale, this past year set the stage for an evolution in strategy.

“In 2019, ecommerce was 10% of our total revenue,” Kagan says. “2020, we’re looking at 30%, and I suspect that 2021 will be a 50% split.”

Those numbers reflect some big changes behind the scenes. Ecommerce sales require some reliable digital infrastructure, and ApparelMagic has been the label’s data powerhouse when it comes to going online.

“ApparelMagic has been instrumental in our pivoting to a direct-to-consumer business model and incredibly flexible with the changes that we needed to make in order to survive this incredibly challenging business environment,” Kagan says.

Kagan’s colleague, ecommerce manager John Cioni, agrees, seeing a myriad of unique ways the brand has used ApparelMagic in recent months.

“At one point we didn’t know who would and who wouldn’t be taking orders,” Cioni says. “So the reporting where we could see projections on our inventory going out into the future was really helpful.”

Cioni cites the ease of working with ApparelMagic’s API to add new functionality to Lola & Sophie’s ecommerce site that all syncs back effortlessly to ApparelMagic.

“We added to our website support for backorder and preorders on styles so we could rapidly recut if need be,” Cioni says. “It’s been great because it allows a revenue stream that may have not been there otherwise. That was huge for us on the ecommerce side of things.”

The new Linesheet Creator tool has also been a welcome surprise for the brand. With more sales appointments remote, their sales team can make quick presentations on the fly.

“What we’ve been doing is custom tailoring linesheets for them to streamline the whole selling process,” Cioni says. “Our in-house sales rep knows her customer. Rather than bogging them down with an hour and a half of product that they will never buy, it’s very tailored to exactly what it is she thinks they could be buying.”

With this kind of thinking, it’s obvious that this isn’t Lola & Sophie’s first rodeo. Having survived fashion’s previous downturn more than a decade ago, the team already knew how to adapt to a changing climate. They knew this was the time to take a few risks to remain relevant.

“We’ve certainly stepped up our efforts with advertising and direct mailings,” Kagan says. “We sent out a catalog at the end of 2020 to go out to 100,000 consumers.”

Why go the route of ink on paper? In an environment of hours-long Zoom meetings and social media scrolling, the opportunity of looking at a physical piece of branding makes for a better connection with Lola & Sophie’s target customers.

“It feels more real than an ad on Instagram or Facebook,” Kagan says. “Our target audience still likes to touch and feel the product before they commit.”

The pandemic has changed a lot of things, but some things, like the fashion industry’s resiliency, prove stronger than ever.

“We’re a creative bunch,” Kagan says. “Give us a challenge and we’ll meet it.”

Portland Garment Factory is ApparelMagic’s 2020 Innovator of the Year

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The saying goes that a crisis shows your true character, and if their approach to 2020 is any indication, Portland Garment Factory is one of fashion’s forces for good.

The Oregon-based factory had been in business for 12 years manufacturing for local and international clients when the pandemic hit. Business slowed right away, according to Donna White, Portland Garment Factory’s operations manager, but they retooled their mission for the short term.

“In March when Covid hit, we saw the loss of projects at the same time that we got word of an impending shortage of PPE in our area,” White says. “We identified two goals for PGF: 1. Stay in business and 2. Be helpers.”

Leveraging their unique position as a domestic manufacturer, Portland Garment Factory immediately saw ways that they could make a difference.

“We hit the ground running and started making medical masks at PGF and selling them at cost to the healthcare community,” White says.

Pivoting to masks ensured that while their production lines might have slowed from client projects, they kept a steady stream of fulfilling work for the team. Their other unique business feature, their online store, aptly named PGF Gift Shop, also became a part of their 2020 plan.

“After the need for medical masks subsided, we started making and selling reusable, cloth masks for the general public as well as custom orders for other businesses and organizations,” White says.

Online among PGF Gift Shop’s offerings is their LeMask, a convertible face mask/head scarf/neckerchief hybrid that for every one sold, they donate a barrier mask to a local nonprofit.

“To date, we’ve made over 60,000 masks in our factory and we’ve donated over 2,700 masks to vulnerable communities.”

In tandem with this shift to producing their own products, they started ramping up their existing offerings including a loose collection of cushions, pet beds, and even clothing and accessories.

The wide variety comes with a message: Portland Garment Factory is a zero-waste facility and items are created using the excess fabric and trims left over from the factory’s client projects. Large scraps turn into attractive patchworks, and tiny leftover pieces of fabric are pulverized and turned into a fluffy filling that beats out conventional synthetic fills in terms of sustainability.

According to White, last year was all about “making the system that we have work to meet the occasion.”

“It’s been a really interesting transition during the pandemic,” White says. “Prior to the pandemic, we were almost exclusively producing client orders at our factory and doing development and full service production.”

Recognizing their business’s capabilities and the pandemic-led push to move more online, they successfully survived–and thrived–in 2020.

“It has been a challenging year but we are grateful that we are still open, and that we’ve had the opportunity to make a positive impact.”

White points to ApparelMagic, the tool they’ve used for the past six years to track and manage their manufacturing, as one system they can rely on when little around them is functioning like normal.

“I’ve had nothing but amazing support from ApparelMagic,” White says.

And what’s next for 2021?

“We’re really hopeful. We’re already experiencing business picking up,” White says. “The kind of business that, pre-pandemic, we relied upon.”

That said, they’re not forgetting what they’ve learned in the past year, and Portland Garment Factory is already planning to expand their gift shop.