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LaQuan Smith nominated for CFDA Award

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No stranger to the red carpet, LaQuan Smith has been nominated for a CFDA Award for Womenswear Designer of the Year.

The 2022 award ceremony, taking place in New York, rewards the leading voices in the fashion industry, anointing the newest names and welcoming the hottest trendsetters to the influential establishment.

LaQuan Smith, an ApparelMagic client, has been welcomed into the industry by the merit of his daring cuts and his all-star roster of glamazon fans.

With notable celebrities like Beyonce, Khloe Kardashian, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Sydney Sweeney as recent converts, Smith has been the one to wear since starting his line. All signs point to him getting even bigger in the coming year.

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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Prabal Gurung and LaQuan Smith stun at the Met Gala

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The Met Gala is many things: a promotion for a museum exhibition, the red carpet to end all red carpets, and a fundraiser for one of fashion’s biggest institutions. With stakes that high, designers pull out all the stops to create our era’s most iconic, relevant looks. As usual, ApparelMagic clients pulled together some of the most talked-about ensembles of the night.

La La Anthony chose a look by LaQuan Smith that was all glamour, all the time, just like the woman herself. The dress by Smith was in his signature sleek, sultry mode, and it stood out for its subtle nod to the night’s theme of Gilded Glamour. Learn more about how Smith uses ApparelMagic to manage his brand’s growing success.

Red carpet stalwart Prabal Gurung also dressed a number of the most stylish celebrities for fashion’s biggest night.

Gurung dressed pop star Camila Cabello in a midriff-baring white duchesse satin gown with a magnificent train.

Model Quannah Chasinghorse wore a diaphanous blue gown by the designer.

Actress Ashley Park of Emily in Paris fame was dressed in a gilded-age appropriate look: corsetry up top with a ostrich feather skirt.

And speaking of the gilded age, Denée Benton, star of the Gilded Age television series, updated her on-screen look with upcycled silk in vibrant red and shocking pink.

Fresh off of her latest starring role, Michelle Yeoh was resplendent in a Prabal Gurung gown in mint green.

Also dressed by Gurung was KiKi Layne, who accessorized her full-skirted pink dress with pristine opera gloves.

LaQuan Smith is the ApparelMagic Designer of the Year

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Say you’re the biggest name in fashion. You’ve dressed all the biggest names in music and celebrity. Beyonce’s a big fan. The Kardashians collectively owe you their greatest looks. The Jenners, too, look best in your wares. What’s next?

LaQuan Smith has had to answer all of these questions, and each time, the brand ups the ante. Last season, it was a show on the top of the Empire State Building. This season, it was opening their New York Fashion Week show with the It Girl of the moment (and Kanye West collaborator) Julia Fox.

Jennifer Epstein, Director of Sales at LaQuan Smith, has been a part of the meteoric rise, and she’s been part of the effort behind the glamor to turn a force of fashion into something to reckon with at retail.

Growing isn’t easy even at a normal pace, but when you’re the talk of the town, that exponential growth can be hard to handle from the backend.

“We were manually entering in every single invoice, and that was taking forever,” Epstein says.

When it got to be too much, she turned to ApparelMagic for a cost-effective solution that would keep records accurate, even as their business grew in leaps and bounds.

“Once I opened the department stores, I knew we had to put something in place. There was no way I could physically do this, or rely on someone else to do it,” Epstein says.

ApparelMagic gave her team a way to keep track of sales and inventory from one place, syncing across the system and ensuring numbers were accurate everywhere.

“The collection has grown tremendously in terms of categories and SKUs,” Epstein says. “This avoids a lot of mistakes entering orders at larger volumes as our business starts to get bigger.”

Finally, the brand has a reliable solution that can scale with the business. Growing pains are diminishing, and the team at LaQuan Smith has fewer headaches as they write their next chapter.

“It has added structure to the back end of our business that we hadn’t had before,” Epstein says. “ApparelMagic greatly helps in the organization of all of the new customers that we have acquired.”

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.

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.’”

Bode Logo

Bode wins CFDA Award

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At the 2021 CFDA Awards, presented by the Council of Fashion Designers in America in New York, Emily Bode Aujla won the award for American Menswear Designer of the Year.

Her brand, Bode, uses ApparelMagic’s fashion ERP software to manage its growing business and all of the opportunities, challenges, and rewards of operating a fashion brand today.

Bode has grown from a new voice within the fashion industry to join its upper echelons at a rapid pace. Its rise has tracked a new cultural shift in gender presentation and sustainable practices. Bode’s signature mix of reused textiles and ornate embellishments has not just kept up with the times—it’s changed them.

Bode Aujla is no stranger to accolades. In 2018, her brand was named a runner-up for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund. Just a year later, the designer took home the award for Best Emerging Designer at the CFDA Awards in 2019.

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!

Prabal Gurung’s all-American girls

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Just before dressing seemingly nearly everyone at the America-themed Met Gala, Prabal Gurung designed a collection honoring the “American Girl” and all that means in 2021. That meant an inclusive, intersectional embrace of models across spectrums of size, race, and gender. It also meant a vibrant collection that felt of-the-moment in a time when we’re all still struggling to remember what year it is.

Florals for spring…but groundbreaking? Here, under Gurung’s aegis, it’s absolutely possible. Abstracting chintzy prints, blowing them up, and pairing them with fluorescent colors and parachute proportions, he makes the well-trodden tropes of spring fresh again. Picnic ginghams were done in bright oranges and pinks or stretched across curves in body-con cocktail dresses.

And genderplay was all over too, with suiting and skirting that was treated with little care for the binary, like a pastel menswear getup covering up a drapey silk top.

Towards a pastel modernity with Jonathan Simkhai

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The early oughts are officially back. ApparelMagic client Jonathan Simkhai’s spring 2022 collection shown at New York Fashion Week felt like a refreshing breeze from simpler times. Harkening back to the shapes and refinement of the days of the legendary Helmut Lang, Simkhai took on the minimalist mantel and drew up a line of sportswear of the most chic sort.

Simkhai multiplied spaghetti straps and subtracted midriffs. Dividing layers in suiting into multiple layers and adding on strips and ties that danced in the wind, the collection was full of things to look at while at the same time so much more than the sum of its parts.

Though sleek, almost severe cuts made strong statements, they were beautifully offset by a very human materiality. Whites, sands, lavenders, and periwinkle all draped effortlessly across models’ skins, and fabrics were buttery soft.

Simkhai is one designer never content to stay in one lane, and after this collection, it’s clear that, from maximal to minimal, he can do anything he sets his mind to.

ApparelMagic users make the Met Gala’s best dressed list

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Whether in threads inspired by home-spun Americana or in full-blown American glamor, ApparelMagic clients dressed some of the biggest names in fashion, sports, music, cinema, and photography. See our big picks of the night:

Venus Williams went old-school Hollywood in a vibrant red gown by Prabal Gurung.

Lorde took on the arts and crafts movement in custom Bode.

Actress Barbie Ferreira had a pearly moment in an intricately beaded dress by Jonathan Simkhai.

Superstar gymnast Simone Biles layered a bodysuit and a daring ballgown in AREA.

Gemma Chan paid homage to Qing dynasty artistry in Prabal Gurung.

Tyler Mitchell gave evening a sporty update in baseball-inspired Bode.

Diane Kruger lit up the carpet in a fluorescent Prabal Gurung number.

Precious Lee went business not-so-casual in a coat dress by Area.

Leon Bridges took on some vintage inspiration in his suede Bode jacket.

Teyana Taylor looked dipped in mercury in a gown by Prabal Gurung