Stylerunner, an online retail start-up providing designer activewear, has deployed a unified cloud platform to modernise its B2C e-commerce and transform its business operations.
Twin sisters, Julie and Sali Stevanja, who founded the business in October 2012, recently selected NetSuite SuiteCommerce in a bid to run their entire business from one unified cloud commerce platform and manage end-to-end business processes.
Stylerunner plans to run its mission-critical business processes – including financials, CRM, marketing, order management, inventory management, warehouse management, shipping and tax reconciliation – all on one single, unified software platform without the need for a big IT team and huge overheads.
The company has seen massive growth, moving from 11 brands to almost 50 and shipping to 65 countries, and with plans for further international expansion, a new platform was necessary to support its goals.
Over the past two years, Stylerunner has worked with multiple disparate software systems including a custom-built e-commerce site, accounting software, third-party EDM providers, CRM systems and numerous Excel spreadsheets.
Though successful individually, there was a strong need to replace them with a collective solution that could deliver on all of Stylerunner’s requirements in one central system, while also allowing future scalability and development.
After evaluating a number of software solutions, Stylerunner turned to the NetSuite cloud.
Stevanja says that with a management team frequently travelling or working remotely, a cloud-based system was a pre-requisite for any new system.
"Given the rapidity of our expansion, we need the flexible, access-anywhere architecture that NetSuite provides to be able to accommodate our medium-term growth plans, while guaranteeing simple and cost-effective add-on functionality as and when we expand into new territories and retail channels," she says.
Stevanja adds that the success of the business was predicated on how well it anticipated and responded to the needs of its growing international customer base.
"NetSuite can enable us to carry out the detailed customer segmentation we need in order to do this. For example, we can create fields within our purchase orders to not only categorise by sales or product categories, but also by interests so we can analyse how profitable yoga apparel is versus running wear,” she says.
“We love that we can have that sort of data at our fingertips in a matter of moments as it can enable us to operate as a much more sophisticated and efficient company, far surpassing the insights that were previously available to us."
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The new CRM provides the ability to micro-segment to drive future marketing initiatives, and support the loyalty rewards program Stylerunner expects to introduce in 2015.
With plans to expand globally, Stylerunner will also benefit from the multi-currency, multi-language, multi-region support offered by NetSuite’s unified, omni-channel commerce platform as it launches its localised sites in the UK, US and Asia in 2015.
This modernisation effort aims to allow the company to gain the agility, scalability and flexibility to grow and expand the businesses with a 360-degree view of customers in a future proofed environment.