Giantnerd steers its way to multichannel success with Brightpearl

The background

Giantnerd is dedicated to manufacturing the highest quality bike frames, whilst offering world class customer service and satisfaction.

Focused on offering high performance carbon fiber frames, they are so confident in the quality of the Tommaso brand, that they offer a lifetime warranty on the bike frames and forks. Inherently unusual for carbon frames, it’s a bold statement and bigger brands in the industry do not offer such a promise.

Giantnerd has another stand out service called ‘ready to ride’; they’ll tune the bike, build it, tighten all the bolts, set all tension settings then ship the bike to you in a patented box. Once the bike has safely arrived at its destination, it’s ready to ride within minutes. If you don’t love the bike within your ‘seven day test ride’, they’ll send you a free shipping label so you can ship the bike back in the box – and get a full refund.

Giantnerd are building their business via their Shopify webstore, as well as their Amazon and eBay marketplaces from their warehouse and showroom in Denver. They sell bike parts, pedals, accessories, and apparel through their multiple sales channels, as well as the Italian heritage Tommaso bikes.

We caught up with Justin Essler, General Manager at Giantnerd to find out more.

The challenge

In 2012, Giantnerd was taken over by a new owner, who was keen to refocus the service they were offering. As part of this new strategy, the company had to downsize.

Justin knew that to turn the company around, he’d want a system in place to help manage the business. Previously, the company had been using NetSuite, but the decision was made to change systems because it was too expensive and complicated.

“I decided to move from NetSuite to Brightpearl as it was a better financial option for us, but still a really strong system to run the business from,” Justin told us. “Brightpearl is much easier to train other employees on, it’s a better price point, and unlike NetSuite, it integrates with Amazon.”

Key Challenges:

• Managing all their sales channels in one place, including Amazon
• Ensuring accurate inventory levels
• Gaining insight into how the business was doing

The solution

As Giantnerd had previous experience with an ERP system, they knew how beneficial such a system is for a business, so it was important they got setup with Brightpearl quickly. Once Justin got his product, customer and sales data exported out of NetSuite and imported into Brightpearl, he was up and running.

“Our data was very clean and we got setup with Brightpearl really quickly – I would estimate it took us about 20 hours to implement,” Justin explained.

Giantnerd prides itself on customer service, and part of that is being able to offer a speedy checkout experience. To help facilitate their slick operations, they use a combination of ShipStation and Shopify with Brightpearl.

“The combination of Shopify, ShipStation and Brightpearl is awesome,” Justin says. “The Brightpearl ShipStation integration has always been great – the tracking information syncs flawlessly from one to the other, and there’s never been a problem. It’s easy to link our shipping rates into the system and streamline the process.”

Justin adds: “Brightpearl is a really strong platform, particularly for inventory management and accounting. It gives me the ability to oversee the entire business. It’s easy to use and everyone working in the business knows how to use Brightpearl to streamline their workflows.”

The future

The ultimate goal for Giantnerd is to continue to build the Tommaso brand. Justin says: “With the help of Brightpearl, we’ve grown over 34%, and now that we’re operationally stable, our focus is to grow the business even further. I’d like to be selling more across multiple channels, and I see us selling through a Tommaso-branded website in the not too distant future.”

www.giantnerd.com