Brightpearl and Shopify: working together to save Icelantic time and improve their customer communication

The background

Icelantic is a skiing equipment company based in Golden, Colorado. Formed in 2006 in Evergreen, Colorado, they made their name designing and selling their own skis and has recently branched out into clothing and accessory lines. They sell to customers via their Shopify webstore and flagship retail outlet.

Icelantic take pride in their designs and community, partnering with the Tenth Mountain Division Foundation and working with local artists such as Travis Parr, who is also Icelantic’s Art Director. They source all their materials on home soil and work closely with a local snowboarding factory, Never Summer Industries, which manufactures their designs.

Icelantic began as an idea that founder and CEO, Ben Anderson had in high school. In the space of ten years, Ben expanded his vision from a small shop in his parents’ garage, into a highly successful omnichannel retail and wholesale business turning over $3m a year, an increase of 15% from last year.

Ben worked a six month internship at a small ski company in Boulder, Colorado before studying industrial design at college. Harnessing the skills he needed, Ben capitalized on the links he had forged at the company he interned for and purchased some ski-making equipment from them. Next followed innovative ski designs courtesy of local artists, a keen business plan and the necessary investment to get off the slopes. Icelantic was launched!

The challenge

Icelantic began by using separate systems for their accounting, inventory management, order fulfillment and shipping. Ben and the team quickly realized that having such an array of independent systems with no established means of integration was not working well for them. “We were not getting accurate inventory numbers and sales reports. Working with QuickBooks was not going well and was pretty tough,” Ben told us.

Key Challenges:

• Finding a single multichannel retail system
• Improving sales reporting
• Improving inventory management

The solution

So Icelantic began looking for software to consolidate their different systems and store their functions in one place. Brightpearl was one of a number of systems that Icelantic considered, but it was to be the only one that met Icelantic’s requirements. As Ben put it: “Brightpearl really opened our eyes to the potential.”

It was very important to Icelantic that accounting, sales, inventory management and order fulfillment were integrated centrally, as was a seamless link to their webstore, which is why Icelantic chose Brightpearl.

Icelantic had a smooth transition to Brightpearl. Ben explained: “Moving to Brightpearl was great. It was pretty easy overall. The training was really top notch. It saved us time and money and allowed us to hit the ground running. That was a big problem with our last system. The customer service was great too. Our questions were responded to quickly and correctly. We went live in two months.”

Icelantic were looking to improve the stability of their webstore too and chose Shopify as it partners naturally with Brightpearl. “We made the decision to go with Shopify after we made the decision to go with Brightpearl and chose it because it integrates so well with it,” concluded Ben.

Key Strengths:

• Ability to connect with multiple channels
• Partners naturally with Shopify
• Integrated accounting
• Real-time reporting

The future

Ben still feels the same energy for his business today that he had when he was formulating it in high school. He says: “I love coming up with creative concepts and making them come to life.”

Looking to the horizon, Ben sees Icelantic’s future as continuing to build on their wholesale sales where they predict they will continue to see more growth. They will also increase their web presence and look to open more retail stores.

And as Icelantic evolves, they will seek to involve their customers more than ever before. Ben explains: “We are looking into developing customer experiences such as user concerts and ski adventures. We like having our customers be a part of what we do.”

www.icelanticskis.com