Centralized data and streamlined workflows spell impressive growth for CMS & Sons

The background

CMS & Sons are a family-run teamwear, workwear, promotional clothing and trophy supplier from Pontyclun in South Wales. They offer their customers personalized options such as printing, embroidery and engraving. The business has three arms: CMS Teamwear, Trophies and Medals Online, which has a retail client base of schools, clubs and sports teams, and Cobra Workwear, which has wholesale clients in the civil engineering and construction sector.

CMS & Sons enjoy the benefits of varied customer bases. They work with well-known companies such as international security services company, G4S. They’re working with customers across the country from their showroom in Wales and via their Magento webstores.

Terry Davies, founder of CMS & Sons, set out on a sales journey which saw him selling a wide variety of items (completely unconnected to the product range of today), then work boots, finally culminating in personalized sportswear, workwear and trophies. CMS & Sons was born. They launched their CMS Teamwear website first, and eBay shortly followed. Business was good but they started to encounter the logistical problems of managing an omnichannel business.

The challenge

Like many businesses, CMS & Sons began by using a range of disparate systems to manage their accounting, inventory and orders.

Aled Davies, Director of Sales told us: “We were doing our accounting on Sage, taking down orders on pieces of paper and manually entering information into Excel spreadsheets. We could, and did, lose orders with Sage and we had no idea of what sales we had done until our accountant came in at the end of the month. We had no idea of what inventory we had, which meant we kept over-ordering from our suppliers.”

Key Challenges:

• No control of sales orders – leading to lost revenue
• Inaccurate inventory – leading to over-ordering and holding too much stock
• Lack of sales reporting and a reliance on an external accountant
• Too many disconnected systems

The solution

Realizing that managing their business on Sage and spreadsheets was unsustainable, CMS began the search for a new management system. Aled describes the search they had undertaken: “We looked around at some other solutions like NetSuite. They did some of what we wanted, but not everything we wanted. Brightpearl just made a lot of sense.”

CMS & Sons started using Brightpearl at the end of 2014 with the help of one of Brightpearl’s partners, Vismagic. “It was a big step because we had no client database,” Aled told us. “We had to create one to import into Brightpearl. It was a big job, but it was worth it. We had lots of help and went live in 6-8 weeks.”

Upon going live with Brightpearl, it wasn’t long before CMS & Sons could see the benefits. “Straightaway, we would see all our orders and where we were with them. We could see how the business was performing whenever we wanted.”

Fast forward two years and the picture is even brighter. Aled says: “Last month, we did 740 eBay sales. Before Brightpearl, we did 20 a month. We’ve gone from a couple of pounds a month on eBay to regularly doing over £10k a month. It has almost become another section of the business.”

Key Strengths:

• Comprehensive order management
• Full inventory control and reporting
• Real-time sales reporting and accounting
• All core functions are now in a centralized platform

The future

Aled tells us: “We grow year-on-year with Brightpearl. In our first full year, our turnover grew by almost 30%.”

In the next five years, CMS & Sons are on target to turnover £4-5m, employ another 10-15 staff and move to a bigger premises. They attribute a key factor of this to Brightpearl.

“Brightpearl has been a massive part of our growth. It’s given us what we needed to grow our business and as we get bigger, the savings will grow with us,” Aled says. “It might seem like a big step, but in time savings, you make back what you pay out over and over again. I should have done it a lot sooner.”

All the CMS & Sons websites:
CMS Teamwear: www.cmsteamwear.co.uk
Trophies and Medals: www.trophiesandmedalsonline.co.uk
Cobra Workwear: www.cobra-workwear.co.uk