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.

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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.

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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.

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!”

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.”