News just in – The Sunday Times has released their lauded annual list of fastest-growing brands across Great Britain. Unsurprisingly, several of those celebrated companies are users of Brightpearl and Inventory Planner by Sage – and we’re delighted to see them in the spotlight.
Read on to discover exactly how Brightpearl and Inventory Planner helped fuel the incredible high-growth success of these companies, and what impact their use could have on ambitious online retailers looking to dominate the e-commerce space.
AYBL
- 15th in the Sunday Times list
- 169% YoY growth rate
- £30M in revenue
Storming into number 15 in the Times list, online athleisure brand AYBL has made incredible strides this last year with an impressive 169% YoY growth rate, and hitting almost £30M in revenue.
After quitting university in 2018, Founder Reiss Edgerton and his brother Kris set up the multi-website retail brand, which specializes in women’s fitness gear such as leggings, sports bras and shorts. In the years since, the brand’s success has skyrocketed – in part due to Reiss syncing AYBL with Inventory Planner from the start.
The tool’s full inventory visibility and in-depth insights allowed AYBL to reduce overbought stock by 40% and improve inventory profitability by 25%. The team also saved over 100 hours a month formerly spent on manual sales forecasting calculations.
Reiss says choosing the right tech tools has played a critical role in the business’s prosperity, and he credits Inventory Planner with helping the business scale.
“As a tech tool, it runs to the heart of our business and has proved critical in helping us achieve fast but meaningful growth,” he says.
“With Inventory Planner, you can become an instant expert in replenishment – able to do the job as well, if not better, as someone with 15 years experience and in a fraction of the time.”
Passenger Clothing
- 9th in the Sunday Times list
- 205% YoY growth
- £18.6M in revenue
The highest-scoring Brightpearl customer on the list, Passenger Clothing achieved an immense 205% growth rate, placing it within the top 10 fastest-growing brands in Britain.
Formerly a mainstay of B2B and wholesale retail, the popular outdoor apparel brand had looked to boost its direct-to-consumer sales and international reach in recent years, and credited Brightpearl for making these growth goals possible.
With Brightpearl’s world-class library of Plug & Play integrations, and a powerful Automation Engine that streamlines and automates processes in ordering, warehouse, shipping and fulfilment, Passenger has been able to seamlessly integrate its tech stack and business operations. Working from one central source of truth, the brand can continue to reach high levels of growth despite increasing backend complexity.
Founder Richard Sutliffe said, “We needed to manage both wholesale and direct-to-consumer sales as well as future proof the business for our global expansion, where we’d have stock in multiple locations.
“That’s where Brightpearl came in. We knew we needed to bring in a retail-focused system to manage that, and we knew we didn’t have that in our existing tech stack.
“It has really helped us transition into new levels of growth.”
Maniere De Voir
- 50% YoY growth rate
- £34.7M in revenue
- One of The Sunday Times’ 100 fastest-growing brands
Launched by former professional footballer Reece Wabara, online apparel brand Maniere De Voir has carved its own space in the lux fashion industry since launching in 2014. A French phrase meaning ‘way of seeing’, Maniere De Voir’s unique products for men and women include blazers, dresses, jackets, shirts and co-ordinated two pieces that combine the tailored look of lux brands with on-trend street and sportswear styles.
With multiple shop-fronts and different currencies to manage, the brand has massively benefited from using Inventory Planner by Sage as a smart, integrative tool that offers inventory insights accurately in real-time. The in-depth reporting functionality has been essential to Financial Director Richard Udeze, who uses it to aggregate inventory levels against margins.
“Inventory Planner has definitely been an enabler for growth,” he says. “We rely on that gross profit margin, so to have an accurate, top-line profit margin at all times allows us to effectively manage that bottom line.
“When your business is making 10 million plus, it’s far too risky to hope for the best – it’s vital the figures are representative of truth.”
With Inventory Planner’s reliable data visibility that reflects stock levels on a granular level (as honed as style, size, color and location), the fashion retailer has laser-targeted overstock, boosted its bestsellers and streamlined its entire inventory for maximum profits.
Furniturebox
- 79th in The Sunday Times list
- 15.9% YoY growth rate
- £15.9M revenue
After sustaining huge growth during the pandemic, UK homeware favourite Furniturebox has continued its supercharged expansion, placing 59th in The Sunday Times list of fastest-growing retailers. This year their 15.9% growth rate saw the brand making £15.9M in revenue.
Initially started by 17 year old friends Monty and Dan, who dropped university plans to focus on bringing furniture into the e-commerce space, Furniturebox has since exploded in popularity. But it’s when the team implemented Brightpearl as a central source of truth for their carefully curated tech stack that growth really took off for the retailer.
“The multi-channel nature of our business meant we needed a central hub that brought everything together in one place, and Brightpearl delivered,” said James Ewens, Head of E-Commerce for Furniturebox.
“As our sales channels expanded to include Wayfair, Amazon, Ebay, ManoMano, Wowcher and OnBuy, we used Brightpearl to give us all the information we needed in real time.”
The brand also uses Inventory Planner by Sage to accurately forecast sales and target slow-moving and best-selling items. Using the tool, the company has reduced stockouts by 30%.
Fairfax & Favor
- 79th in The Sunday Times list
- 61% YoY growth rate
- £35.5M in revenue
Independent fashion brand Fairfax & Favor merges luxury and country-inspired styles to create its high-quality shoes and leather goods, and has gone from strength to strength since its launch a decade ago in 2013.
Following epic growth across the last few years, the team has continued to expand into different regions and markets, and credits Brightpearl and Inventory Planner for allowing it to streamline its complex ordering and inventory systems. With the money and time saved, the e-commerce business has been able to focus on expanding its lux product lines and aim towards growth.
“We’ve found that you can implement a lot of different systems which do a lot of different things. But if you can find one software that can do it all, it makes it far more cost effective than to implement different systems that each deliver different things which you can’t integrate together,” said Rob Cooper, General Manager of the brand.
Rob told us. Stuart agreed: “Having an all-in-one system is really great. Everyone knows what’s happening across the business now. We used to use different systems, now we’re all using it as a team together”
CurrentBody
- 89th in The Sunday Times list
- 55% YoY growth rate
- £59 in revenue
Ever since 2009, the two co-founders of CurrentBody, Laurence Newman, aged 48, and Andrew Showman, aged 42, have been devoting themselves to selling at-home beauty devices.
A recent push into creating their own-brand products propelled sales to a whopping £59.1 million. Then the brand, a long-term Brightpearl customer, soared in popularity after its LED face mask featured in the hit TV series Emily in Paris.
On its future, a company spokesperson said: “Looking forward, the company is focusing on international expansion through local websites and warehousing. Currentbody has invested heavily over the last two years in their platform operations [like Brightpearl] and central functions allowing them to scale quickly and cost effectively from their existing base.”
Get in touch with Brightpearl or Inventory Planner today to eradicate time-intensive, error-prone manual operations and set up your e-commerce business for rapid growth – or check out the entire list of Britain’s fastest-growing private companies.
