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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!

Calder Carmel’s access to ApparelMagic’s instant inventory reporting aids their customer loyalty journey

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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 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.”

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.

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.

Captain Fin saves time and money with ApparelMagic’s automated ecommerce integration

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Automation is the name of the game for surf specialty brand Captain Fin. Since its founding in 2007, the team has been moving from strength to strength, growing to be an international business. Now that Captain Fin is using ApparelMagic and its wide variety of powerful integrations, they’re able to spend less time on data entry and more time on what’s really important: surfing.

The brand started with one simple idea: introduce art into the world of surfboard fins.

“Traditionally surf board fins that go on the bottom of your board were just a solid color,” Captain Fin CEO Danny Gillis remembers. “We grew up skateboarding and snowboarding. Growing up, you always had your favorite snowboard that had artwork on it.”

The Big Idea

But like the extreme sports motto, Captain Fin wasn’t content with just any designs to decorate the line: they went big.

“We were the first company in the surf industry to collaborate with professional surfers, artists, and musicians to put artwork on high performance surf board fins and products,” Gillis says.

The concept has been a hit, growing the brand over time to include men’s and boys’ apparel. Now they’re stocked online, in brick-and-mortar stores, across the US, and in about 40 countries around the world. So how does a brand scale that fast without feeling the pinch?

“We’ve expanded online, and that business is really growing,” Gillis says. “ApparelMagic has helped us in a lot of ways to grow the business and have visibility into the business. What we can do with Shopify and ApparelMagic and systems like this in the cloud is incredible.”

“It’s saved us a lot of time, and it saves us on the manual side for processing orders. A ton of time.”

Danny Gillis, Captain Fin CEO

Growing Pains

It wasn’t always this easy for the brand. They’ve ran their business using multiple systems and found that their old software overcomplicated their data and workflow, to the detriment of the whole team.

“It wasn’t a system that if you hired a new employee they could get on and figure it out. It was highly customizable—too customizable—and it didn’t integrate with anything. It was an antiquated technology.”

The team learned quickly that when a piece of software is integrated, that doesn’t mean it’s optimized.

“It was integrated, but you had to manually push things through,” Gillis says. “You had to go in and look at your orders everyday, and there was some manual entry.”

 
 
 
 
 
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Switching to ApparelMagic

When enough was enough, they looked for something that could save the business time and money, and they found ApparelMagic.

“We needed something that was more scalable, that integrated, and that anyone could get onto and figure it out pretty quickly,” Gillis says. “We couldn’t be happier, honestly. It’s a really good system for that.”

What works for Captain Fin is using ApparelMagic as the central hub of their business, linking it with integrations to Shopify, CartRover, and 3PL Central to round out their workflow.

“What we can do with Shopify and ApparelMagic and systems like this in the cloud is incredible.”

Danny Gillis, Captain Fin CEO

Automated Ecommerce

“We’ve got it all set up now so it’s all relatively automatic and seamless,” Gillis says. “An ecommerce order comes through Shopify into ApparelMagic, pushes over into our warehouse, they ship the goods, and then it pushes back into ApparelMagic with tracking information and shipping. It’s really great. It’s saved us a lot of time, and it saves us on the manual side for processing orders. A ton of time.”

When it comes to ERP and fashion business software, getting started is a pain point for many businesses, and that’s why ApparelMagic’s development has always put the user and their experience first.

“One thing that attracted me, of many, to ApparelMagic was that I didn’t have to customize it. Out of the box, it worked for us,” Gillis says. “It had all the features that you would need, whether you’re a large company or a small company. It had everything I needed.”

 
 
 
 
 
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Captain Fin’s Favorite Features

  • Invoicing – “We’re able to invoice directly through ApparelMagic. It’s hooked up to our email system. We can send invoices, and we can track it all through ApparelMagic.”
  • Multi-Currency – “We do a lot of international business so we’re able to send invoices or estimates or quotes in the currency in the country that we’re dealing with, which is really powerful.”
  • Available to Sell Inventory Reports – “We use the automated ATS reports out of ApparelMagic that [customers] get on a recurring basis so they are able to see inventory and reorder when they need to.”
  • Commission Tracking – “Our sales reps are able to log in and see just the accounts that they deal with. We’re able to see in real time who has been paid, when they have been paid, and what they’ve been paid on.”