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How Scott Barber fully integrated all business aspects with ApparelMagic

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Legacy brands have a lot going for them: vendor connections, wholesale distribution networks, and loyal end customers, but they have challenges all their own as they grow to meet challenges of the current era.

Scott Barber, a men’s sportswear line founded nearly 30 years ago in 1994, had steady business for decades and a reputation that preceded it. However, when new management took the business on two years ago, they saw it could reach new heights.

“We’ve given the brand a new life,” says Rosemarie Grieco, Managing Partner of Scott Barber, “by evolving and elevating the collection in the better men’s specialty market, and by expanding our reach on our direct to consumer site.”

This two-pronged approach is the result of fresh thinking and a deep analysis of the Scott Barber business already taking the brand from good to great.

“We are a new team with a new vision,” Grieco says, “and it’s highly appreciated by our retailers!”

As soon as Grieco and her colleagues took on the business, it was clear that outdated technology behind the scenes was holding it back. As a small team, it was important that they could get full control and visibility of each element of the business, and they turned to ApparelMagic to get it done.

“I’m one person,” Grieco says, “so I needed to streamline as much as I could.”

Grieco single-handedly took on the business’s transition to ApparelMagic, integrating their data with built-in tools like line sheets and ApparelMagic Pay, as well as connecting with outside service providers like QuickBooks, NuOrder, and Shopify.

“Every aspect of the business can be run through ApparelMagic,” Grieco says, “and that’s what I love.”

For legacy businesses like Scott Barber, ApparelMagic’s multi-channel sales tools and integrations are ideal. With big wholesale customers like department stores eager to keep Scott Barber in their assortments, for example, it was necessary to connect through EDI.

“EDI is so important and critical to run a business because you have trading partners that work that way,” Grieco says. 

Meanwhile, they also do strong business through an online B2C storefront built through Shopify. ApparelMagic’s platform manages all of these sales channels in one convenient place.

With Scott Barber’s priceless brand equity paired with ApparelMagic now taking them to the next level, the future is bright for another 30 years of continued success.

How Frankies Bikinis manages explosive growth with ApparelMagic

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Open Instagram on any fashionista’s phone, and you’re bound to see a a model, celebrity, or friend posed on a photogenic beach or perched at the edge of an infinity pool. And chances are, that glamourous swimsuit she’s wearing is probably Frankie’s.

Frankie’s Bikinis, that is. Starting as a humble mother-daughter business just a decade ago, founder Francesca Aiello has steadily built an international following for her trend-driven swimsuits.

In the past ten years, the brand has went from influencer darling to Victoria’s Secret protege after a minority stake was made by the lingerie and lifestyle giant.

Since its founding, Frankie’s Bikinis has grown to encompass far more than than those bikinis, now offering a healthy assortment of clothing, activewear, and even skincare staples.

Throughout this explosive growth, the team has relied on ApparelMagic to power their business, acting as a central hub that connects sales, distribution, manufacturing, and design.

“We have a little under 40 people at Frankie’s, and all of them are at some point in ApparelMagic,” says Emma Johnson, head of operations.

And better yet, the team has found the onboarding process for the whole team smooth and efficient, with learning resources and trainings provided by ApparelMagic rather than needing to build their own training program.

“I do a mini-training on how we use it specifically,” Johnson says, “But it helps a lot that I don’t have to train someone on a whole platform”

With tools for everything from tech packs to B2B eCommerce to business intelligence, the software is an invaluable part of daily life at Frankie’s. Not only does it manage the product and sales data, but it reaches out to connect with other services like Shopify, keeping a constantly accurate sync of inventory and styles.

ApparelMagic’s ease of integrating is a huge help for a business that is constantly growing and adapting as they reach new heights. As their needs change, users are able to connect to a range of services as well as develop their own using API access.

“Any coder can come in and read the guides and create a custom integration pretty easily,” Johnson says.

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Introducing a comprehensive returns service recently, the team has automated processes and taken headaches out of their standard workflows. As Frankies goes from strength to strength and continues to grow, they’re able to simplify their day-to-day even as their operations become more complex.

Building a business is tough, but as with their swimwear, Frankies Bikinis makes it look effortless.

How Lemlem doubled their orders and increased their GMV by 167% in just 2 years with Cymbio and ApparelMagic!

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Meet the Brand

Lemlem is an artisan-driven brand of beautiful women’s resort wear made entirely and responsibly in Africa, with a core mission of preserving the local art of weaving in Ethiopia and inspiring economic growth on the continent.

Founded by supermodel Liya Kebede in 2007, Lemlem was born to help preserve the ancient art form of weaving to create a fashion label of love, celebrating women and nature.

The Challenge

Lemlem found the majority of their workload and processes being undertaken manually by a limited-sized team. While this allowed for tight controls, they reached a point where this was no longer sustainable. Seamless integration between ApparelMagic and Cymbio’s platform allowed them to not only save time and money – it also helped improve data quality, streamline metrics, reduce errors and lift employee morale.

The Solution

Since 2017, Lemlem used ApparelMagic’s apparel management software to centralize their operations. ApparelMagic’s software offers leading apparel accounting, inventory control and logistics solutions. Due to Lemlem’s growth and success with ApparelMagic, they were also able to extend their wholesale business with J.Crew and Farfetch. Commencing in 2020, Cymbio provided automated, integrated support to help manage and process orders associated with J.Crew, Madewell plus many more retailers, which has been essential for growth.

This upgraded eCommerce platform elevated the user experience for consumers with an improvement in the ability to personalize their shopping journey. It also allowed Lemlem to enjoy growth in other significant areas, such as design and strategy, given that they had more time.

Only with the effective technology offered by Cymbio was this possible. Cymbio worked closely with Lemlem, maintaining the same team, to support their niche product integration into the eCommerce market.

Recipe for Success

With excellent product quality, inspired by the unique Ethiopian hand-woven patterns and the vibrant, colorful combinations in the streets of Africa, Lemlem is all about happy colors and stripes, creating new casual and chic pieces that are easy to wear on all occasions.

The brand’s products are made entirely and responsibly in Africa inspiring economic growth on the continent.

Lemlem understood the importance of partnering with eCommerce platforms in order for their niche product and reach a global market. Moreover, given their relatively small team, they needed successful retail connections and automation to ensure systems ran smoothly with very little hands-on effort.

“Onboarding with Cymbio has been key to securing our partnership with J.Crew and the ability to manage the increase in orders. Without Cymbio, this just would not have been possible.”

Janise Vargas, Sales Assistant, Lemlem

“We enjoy the ease with which we are able to collaborate and integrate systems with Cymbio. Collaboration isn’t just a strategy but essential for long-term business success, which we feel defines what we have with Cymbio.”

Nicoll Leighton, Operations & Strategy, ApparelMagic

The Results

The successful integration of Cymbio’s eCommerce automated solutions to ApparelMagic’s powerful ERP offered significant growth for Lemlem.

This included:

% GMV change YoY (21/20)- 112% growth

% Orders change YoY (21/20) –106% growth

% GMV Q1 22 vs Q1 21- 167% growth

In addition, the upgraded platform increased the quality of the customer experience (by segmenting and personalizing offers) while simultaneously allowing Lemlem to prioritize and allocate time for other more important tasks such as designing, strategizing and sourcing more (or better) suppliers.

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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.

Meet the winners of the ApparelMagic Awards

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After considerable deliberation around scores of amazing brands, it’s our pleasure to announce the winners of the ApparelMagic Awards 2021. These clients are going above and beyond to push fashion forward as a business and as a field of unfettered creativity.

Designer of the Year: LaQuan Smith

Between dressing the top celebrities and doing the most talked-about runway shows in fashion, LaQuan Smith’s name is on everyone’s lips.

Growth Award: Holderness & Bourne

Holderness & Bourne proves golf apparel is the fastest growing sector in menswear.

Ethical Fashion Award – Amour Vert

Sustainability is the core value at every stage of business for Amour Vert.

B2B Store Showcase – Dromedaris

Dromedaris puts their shoes in the spotlight with their ApparelMagic B2B eCommerce store.

Startup of the Year – JMP The Label

Juliette Porter, one of fashion’s biggest influencers, makes a splash with her new swimwear line.

Stay tuned as we talk to each of our winners about how they’ve successfully met and exceeded their goals over the course of 2021, and what they see next for their brands in 2022!

How Neva Nude left time-consuming, manual inventory management behind with ApparelMagic

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On the west coast, it’s no secret that the best ideas come from Burning Man. For best friends Emma Williams and Tanner Bloom, it was the spark that ignited a booming business.

After a trip to the playa six years ago, Bloom returned with an out-of-the-blue proposal: “What do you think about a pasties company?” 

“I said I didn’t even know what that was, but to leave it with me, and I’d do some research,’” Williams recalls.

Rave fashion like body glitter, nipple pasties, and stick-on crystals was getting big in the festival circuit. Embedded in the rave community, Bloom was looking for things she could dance in for days, and Williams was all about sparkles and glitter. They would make the perfect team. 

Starting Neva Nude

Williams says she got to work immediately mocking up a website and designing packaging. Bloom quickly started to become an expert in logistics. The best friends started the business without an office, a warehouse, or even manufacturers.

“We’d be laminating on the floor in my apartment,” Williams says. “It literally got to the point where I would open my cupboards in my bathroom and pasties would fall out. It was nuts.”

While operating on a shoestring at home, the duo had a knack for getting the word out and getting orders to roll in.

“Once I got a hold of certain buyers’ email addresses, I just didn’t stop,” Williams says. “Once a week, I’d drop them an email. And one day, they’d just respond.”

It didn’t take long until Neva Nude got the attention of some of the biggest names in the space.

“Our first order from Nasty Gal was amazing,” Williams says. “It wasn’t a big order, but it just told me, ‘You know what? We can build a brand here. Big names in the apparel industry are taking note of what we do.’”

Growing Pains

The response from buyers and customers started to become overwhelming, and something had to change to keep up with demand.

“We got this massive order from American Apparel, and we had to handpack every single one item by ourselves in my apartment,” Williams says. “But, it was a great problem to have.”

This rapid success caused its fair share of growing pains, and a lot of those came from having inaccurate inventory. The team had one employee, Emily Farfan, tasked with keeping track of all inventory through a spreadsheet. She had to manually check in shipments and deduct orders from Amazon, Etsy, and wholesalers one by one.

“It’s a lot for one person to do,” Williams says. Between internet connectivity issues at the warehouse and a constant stream of items coming in and out, “Errors are bound to happen when you’re doing 500 SKUs manually.”

“We were using Google Sheets, and it just got to the point where it said we had 100 units, but we’re actually out of stock, and we have an open order.” Williams says. “And I thought, ‘this will take three to four months to order from China!’”

Enter ApparelMagic

“To be honest, I didn’t know anything about WMS and ERP. I had to Google this stuff,” Williams admits.

However, Williams and Bloom weren’t intimidated by industry jargon. With their can-do attitude and hustler mentality, they set about finding software that would optimize their inventory, warehousing, and logistics. 

“QuickBooks was our go-to, but honestly I can’t stand QuickBooks,” Williams says. “It’s more problematic than anything, and it doesn’t track inventory at all.”

At that point, the cobbled together softwares were not cutting it. Neva Nude turned to ApparelMagic when they saw they could get more accurate inventory while at the same time improving the workdays of their team.

“We needed a system that will help us streamline, manage our inventory, and take away all of these manual pieces that we do at the warehouse,” Williams says. “I was hoping it would free up so much of Emily’s time, just being able to log on to the system and see all of the numbers.”

“It was now or never,” Williams says. “I’m very happy we did it now and not when we have 2,500 SKUs.”

Business Optimized

And it doesn’t take an autodidact to learn how to use ApparelMagic. With training materials, weekly live webinars, and a support team to guide them, new users can feel fully supported by the solution.

“Zane from the support team is very knowledgeable and very good at explaining things,” Williams says. “When he’d be doing screen shares with me, he briefly went over the B2B, and three days later, I messaged him, ‘It’s up! It looks amazing!’”

With ApparelMagic’s fully-integrated inventory management, the team has the confidence of knowing exactly what they have on hand, what they need to order, and what’s selling the best.

“In a few clicks, I can check the inventory,” Williams says. And that’s not all. “I can’t believe how much the software actually does. Seeing all the features, I keep thinking to myself, ‘Wow, I can’t believe they thought of this.’”

ApparelMagic’s built-in B2B portal helps Kizzi Dancewear drop cumbersome standalone eCom store

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After a year of cancelled fashion weeks, reduced trade show attendance, and an embrace of work-from-home culture, it’s no wonder that brands are turning to the internet for wholesaling.

With ApparelMagic’s recent introduction of B2B eCommerce, sales can happen instantaneously around the world and across timezones. Integrated directly to their product and inventory data inside ApparelMagic, brands can launch online wholesale environments in just minutes.

Let’s see how one of ApparelMagic’s clients uses it:

The Problem: Standalone B2B Stores

Kizzi Dancewear, a specialty brand that works directly with dance schools and studios, started setting up a standalone wholesale eCommerce store in April of 2020. And a year later, it was still in the works. Until then, they’d been selling exclusively through trade shows and word-of-mouth. While shifting to online wholesale was a great move at the start of the pandemic, that kind of growth has challenges all its own. Kizzi Dancewear CEO Kim Coates said working with another service was full of headaches and constant manual attention.

“It was a boatload of constant importing and exporting,” Coates says. “We just met stumbling block after stumbling block.”

Bogged down in tedious formatting and spreadsheets, her team was busy keeping their B2B store up to date, all the while missing out on time they could use contributing to actual sales.

“For the other sales platform, they wanted this very complicated image naming,” Coates says. “I just said ‘That will not work.’ I can’t go back and edit thousands of images.”

As an established business, Kizzi Dancewear has plenty of product data on file. It’s this current and past season information that allows them to accurately plan and forecast for future seasons. Managing over a hundred thousand SKUs and nearly 1,000 styles inside ApparelMagic is all in a day’s work for Coates and her team, but when it came to getting that product data to their customers, other solutions were falling short.

Introducing ApparelMagic B2B

All that changed this summer when ApparelMagic introduced a built-in B2B eCommerce feature. Now, users can use a simple drag-and-drop interface to build stores and invite their wholesale customers to shop, allowing them to browse products and add them to their cart just like they would when online shopping.

“Everything in the way you set it up has made it so easy for us to use,” Coates says. “Really, in two days, I created everything you see in our store.”

Getting started with ApparelMagic B2B

For Coates, moving over to ApparelMagic’s integrated B2B was a cinch. After hearing about the new feature at one of Kizzi’s leadership meetings, she gave it a spin. How long did it take her to get the hang of it?

“Really, in 48 hours, with just looking at your support portal and someone emailing me a short video link,” Coates says. “And we launched it to over 600 customers within two weeks.”

“That afternoon, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is going to be life-changing!’”

Kim Coates, CEO of Kizzi Dancewear

To add products to the store, Coates simply chose from her brand’s existing products in ApparelMagic inventory data. Advanced controls can further filter products by availability, season, and more. This customized approach allows brands to choose exactly which styles they’d like to sell online.

“It’s shocking how good it is,” Coates says. “I was literally screaming from my office.”

And that’s just the beginning. From there, brands can add their own content through smart widgets, telling that season’s full narrative through embedded videos, links, and custom HTML.

“I put everything there that I could think of from a shopper’s standpoint,” Coates says. “People can search by category, sizing, etc.”

And all of this represented a sea change compared to using a standalone B2B eCommerce solution. With all of the data effortlessly syncing between modules, ApparelMagic is able to deliver accurate stock information through an incredibly intuitive interface.

This accuracy is because ApparelMagic B2B is not a standard integration, translating data across platforms: it’s fully a part of the ApparelMagic ERP system. When customers login to make orders, they’re accessing the latest data from their customized portal into ApparelMagic’s inventory.

Making Sales

Reaching out to new and existing customers is easy. With their data stored safely and privately within ApparelMagic, salespeople can simply invite them to view and shop from the store. Invite them one at a time, or by the hundreds, and ApparelMagic manages their traffic, following customer interaction with Google Analytics.

“We did a mass invitation with a little descriptive information,” Coates says. “Not a lot, because it just doesn’t require very much instruction.”

“We launched it to over 600 customers within two weeks.”

Kim Coates, CEO of Kizzi Dancewear

And customers? They’re falling in love.

“We had one of our biggest customers in our shop,” Coates says. “While they were here, we showed them the store, and they loved it. They thought it’d be so easy for anyone to use.”

The transition to online wholesale has been a win for everyone so far. After sending out a link to the store on a Friday, orders were already flowing in by the time the sales team returned from the weekend.

“The way they come in, it’s really easy for our sales people to know which ones we still need to connect with and send out our invoice and payment method separately. It’s all working really smoothly.”

Next up, Kizzi will be bringing in ApparelMagic Pay to process credit card payments coming through their store. Just like that, a start-to-finish sales process has been transformed.

The Results are in: Selling with ApparelMagic

If Kizzi Dancewear’s experience is anything to go by, ApparelMagic’s built-in B2B eCommerce is the easiest, fastest, and most accurate solution out there. And for ApparelMagic users, it’s included free in all subscriptions from the Professional level and up.

Setting up stores takes just moments, and from there on accepting orders and now taking payments is all handled seamlessly by the web app. Try it and see for yourself.

“I think at this point, it’s just so unbelievably beyond where we were at after a year and a half with another company,” Coates says. “It’s so hard to comprehend how fast we got to where we are.”

Want to learn more about Kizzi Dancewear? Visit their site.

ApparelMagic B2B Quick Facts

  • Add a B2B eCommerce store for free on Professional plans and higher
  • Choose products by season, category, and more
  • Use multiple images, swatches, and descriptions
  • Specify shipping and cancel dates
  • Protect your store with personalized customer logins
  • Filter individual pages and line sheets by buyer
  • Sync orders to your sales team automatically
  • Accept credit card payments with ApparelMagic Pay

Learn more

Naeem Khan gives them the new razzle-dazzle at New York Fashion Week

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ApparelMagic client Naeem Khan is known for his showmanship, and at his lastest event at New York Fashion Week, he did not disappoint. Turning his venue into a glitzy jazz club, live musicians played the hits while Khan’s glamazons twirled down the runway in their finery.

It was a full on rainbow of colors, pattern, embellishment, and texture. Whether strutting in figure-hugging gowns or swanning around in decadent caftans, the Naeem Khan woman is dressed to impress at all her events—and a lot of the time, she is the main event.

With maribou feathers here, and sunflower patterns there, and embroidered naked dresses everywhere, there was something for everyone. Fashion favors the bold, and Naeem Khan is only too ready to step up to the plate!

How ApparelMagic’s manufacturing module is a steady and reliable tool for Portland Garment Factory

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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.

JMP The Label: From spreadsheet pain points to ApparelMagic ERP

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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.

Lola & Sophie grows both direct-to-consumer and wholesale business with ApparelMagic’s key API capabilities and digital line sheets

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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.”