Free Demo

News from ApparelMagic clients

Around the world, the biggest names in fashion choose ApparelMagic

 

 
 
 
 
 
View this post on Instagram
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

A post shared by Sachin & Babi (@sachinandbabi) on

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

Posted by

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.

Featured Post

Prabal Gurung and LaQuan Smith stun at the Met Gala

Posted by

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.

Featured Post

7 Fashion Brands that have capitalized on NFTs

Posted by

NFTs aren’t just for the cryptocrowd anymore. With two fashion weeks under its belt, the metaverse is set up to be the next big stop on the fashion calendar.

1. Jonathan Simkhai’s digital twins

As one of the industry’s leading lights, it’s no surprise that the trendsetters are getting in on the action already. ApparelMagic client Jonathan Simkhai reproduced looks from his fall 2022 collection for a metaverse event on Second Life put on by Everyrealm and Blueberry Entertainment.

 
 

2. ROKSANDA’s virtual show-stoppers 

Proving that fashion can pack just as much of a punch even as pixels, ROKSANDA put their trademark statement-making clothes online. The high fashion brand teamed up with the Institute of Digital Fashion to create an NFT of a dress to debut during Crypto Fashion Week 2022.

3. Tommy Hilfiger jumps into Web3

In March, some of the biggest brands in fashion like Tommy Hilfiger and Elie Saab teamed up for Metaverse Fashion Week, a digital-only fashion week inside the Decentraland platform. With attendance by a who’s who of the decentralized finance and digital art worlds, its front row is becoming an important spot to see and be seen for fashion insiders and tech innovators alike.

 
 

4. Rebecca Minkoff turns the information superhighway into her runway

How does a traditional fashion brand approach new technology? Apparently, with some great panache. Creating looks exclusively for the digital market, Rebecca Minkoff turned the brand DNA into purchasable assets available at THE DEMATERIALIZED marketplace.

5. Diesel goes digital

When cutting-edge fashion and novel forms of art merge, great things can happen. It’s with that knowledge that creative director Glenn Marten transformed his fall 2022 collection for Diesel into NFTs available at Rarible and their own NFT store, D:VERSE.

6. Overpriced.™’s $26,000 hoodie

Fashion loves a tongue-in-cheek joke, and even in its infancy, digital fashion already knows how to make fun of itself. Overpriced.™ notably proved the market for NFTs with their release of a hoodie paired with a NFT, selling on BlockParty for more than any other hooded sweatshirt in history.

 
 

7. Warren Lotas mints Iconic Illustrations

Artwork series are a natural fit for the current trends in NFTs, and today’s artists are able to turn their creativity into profit. Working outside his typical T-shirt canvas, Warren Lotas took his cult-favorite illustrations to the internet with 4,000 fugitive skeletons for his NFT Discord community “The Wild Bunch.” Best yet? They sold out in 9 minutes.

Featured Post

LaQuan Smith is the ApparelMagic Designer of the Year

Posted by

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.”

Featured Post

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

Posted by

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.

Featured Post

Meet the winners of the ApparelMagic Awards

Posted by

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!

Featured Post

5 ways fashion will change in 2022

Posted by

Less than two weeks in, 2022 is already shaping up to be a huge year of growth and movement in fashion. There’s a palpable sense of change in the air, and as technology and fashion are finally converging, we’re about to see a revolution. What will this year mean for the fashion industry? Here are my predictions:

Blockchain in Fashion

Between crypto, NFTs, and the new advancements in Web3 technology, fashion is set to surf a wave of innovation based on the blockchain. Perennially plagued by counterfeiting, luxury fashion and collectible accessories are already turning towards decentralized networks to certify ownership and authenticity. It’s no longer the easily-lost certificate in a nice handbag.

Fashion brands will start utilizing the same minting platforms used by NFT artists to authenticate their goods, creating digital twins in the process that can be integrated into the metaverse. Customers will now have the opportunity to sport the newest fashions not just in real life but in virtual spaces like Decentraland, Sandbox, and Facebook’s new Meta venture. The most cutting-edge fashion will be created and exhibited 100% digitally, where the laws of gravity and thermodynamics don’t apply.

The magic of the blockchain is that it gives power back to the artists and creators, and that doesn’t stop at just the brand. Designers can start earning commissions from their work. For independent creators and intellectual property owners alike, a digital register can simplify keeping track of royalties, helping everyone involved reap the benefits of sales. 

Interested in what else is on the horizon? Read my piece in Rolling Stone.

Ethical Fashion

Ethical fashion is finally going mainstream. Consumers have read the stories about poor working conditions in factories, the climate-altering scale of modern fashion production, and the innovations brands are bringing to market. It’s finally all sinking in.

Sustainable principles are no longer fringe activism, and we’re all going to benefit. Concepts like the circular economy are taking hold in the design studio. A dress can’t just go from fiber to closet to landfill: it can now be designed to be broken back down and rebuilt endlessly. As customers begin to recognize the value in this kind of fashion, it becomes an added value in every SKU.

Our clients like SoftShirts and Anaak are already going down this path. Reaching for organic materials and human-first production, they are the trailblazers who are making fashion better. And they’re not the only ones. 

Digital Design

Design doesn’t just happen in the studio. After almost two years of WFH, designers know they can harness their creativity from wherever they are. Brands will continue to empower their creative staff with flexible roles, empowered by new technology in design development.

With 3D modeling and advanced textile physics, pattern making software has grown leaps and bounds. Through further investment in 2022, designers can create new products from their laptops and iterate completely digitally—no sewing machine required. 

With development instantaneous in the cloud, brands will save on sampling, spending less time and money on prototype development. Sophisticated digital design means less lead time and fewer resources used before going to market.

Pandemic Recovery

COVID-19 represented a shift in nearly every element of life, and getting dressed is no different. As we collectively put away our sweatpants, we’re taking a second look at who we want to be and what we want to wear.

From style we’ll keep from the pandemic (comfortable dressing, masks as an evergreen staple, and the recent vogue for logomania) to what we’ve been missing out on (event dressing, travel wardrobes, and likely, new sweats that don’t remind us of quarantine) fashion is ready for a big shift forward.

For brands, this means staying agile and responding to customer demands as soon as they’re spotted. Powerful forecasting will be de rigueur, and advanced replenishment systems can finally get us off the out-of-stock treadmill we’ve been running on for the past two years. 

Working with retailers, though, will require a whole new approach. Work From Home culture isn’t going anywhere, and even when we’re back in the office, we’ll all be reevaluating our work trips. A successful brand in 2022 has to accommodate buyers from anywhere in the world, so setting up a B2B eCommerce platform is going to be an absolute essential. With these online stores, buyers can browse and add styles to their carts at their leisure, replicating the showroom experience from the comfort of their home or office.

Economic Reset

We’re seeing signs of an economic reset already. As the status quo is evolving, more people are breaking molds and becoming entrepreneurs, fueling a small business boom that’s particularly noticeable within the fashion industry. These rule-breakers are shifting what it means to run a modern business, focusing first on their changing customer profile.

A new generation of shoppers is asking for different modes of browsing and buying. These Gen-Z customers are discovering products on social media like Tik-Tok and Instagram, and they’re forming relationships with brands long before they make their first purchase. 

And no longer are they confined to brick-and-mortar stores and eCommerce outlets—they’re using a whole ecosystem of apps to make their purchases, highlighting the need for a comprehensive, multichannel customer experience. Brands will be well rewarded when they’re the first mover on new platforms and in emerging markets.

And when young customers do buy, optionality is still at the forefront. Businesses will quickly adopt cryptocurrency as a payment method, expanding its utility and its mass adoption. As a side benefit, these early adopters will earn increased social relevance from aligning themselves with both groundbreaking technology.

Going Forward

2022 is going to be full of surprises, but we’re looking forward to a year full of growth, improvement, and openness to change. As the fashion industry embraces the latest technology, we’ll be leading the way forward every step of the way.

-Brandon Ginsberg, ApparelMagic CEO

Featured Post

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

Posted by

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.’”

Featured Post

Track your path to the runway

View demo