ApparelMagic’s built-in B2B portal helps Kizzi Dancewear drop cumbersome standalone eCom store

Case Study, Client

Brandon Ginsberg

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.”