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.
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.”
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!
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.
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.
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:
Basking in the final drops of a New York sunset, ApparelMagic client Cynthia Rowley staged her NYFW fashion show en plein air. Her golden-hour heartbreakers took full advantage of the evening, with their subtle hues lighting up in the daylight.
Printed like a watercolor, one sheer gown stood out for its ease and energy, especially as Rowley paired it with some chunky white sandals. With the lines of a prairie dress but with a mood of languid seduction, it spoke clearly as a summation of the season’s line.
Breezes across the Hudson River made diaphanous gowns flutter and gave new shape to lightweight puffer jackets. Everything was light, light, light in weight but alternatingly moody and fresh in spirit.
Other looks, in black but spangled in rhinestones, reminded you not of the sunset, but of a clear night sky bursting with starlight. Rowley scattered these sparkles judiciously in imagined constellations.
Just like the sunset, the collection captured the vibrant pastels and fleeting energy of a warm evening, as well as the navies and midnight of twilight. A poetic collection from one of New York’s most storied designers.
What’s cool in 2022? Honestly, the best person to ask is Sandy Liang. Long the cool girl par excellence, this ApparelMagic client knows the hum of the street as well as the buzz at whatever gallery opening or dive bar the pretty young things of art, fashion, and music congregate.
So when Liang does her signature sportswear, you know she’s got her finger on the pulse. This season, it’s far beyond her trademark fleeces, and into cottony realms that feel just right for the times. Getting out of our pandemic knits, she’s encouraging an easy-breezy approach full of ruffles and layers, but done with such a je-ne-sais-quoi that it’d be impossible to accuse her frills of frippery.
These are in fact ironic ruffles, that look as aloof as the models wearing them. Even her approach to a classic skirt suit has an air of above-it-all detachment, the tailoring sitting away from the body with the structure of a neoprene. Liang is referencing the greats but making it all her own.
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