Customer Story
Jenny Bird soars high with Brightpearl after migrating away from previous provider
“We trialled another option first, but it provided too much complicated functionality that we did not need for the size of our business. Brightpearl is so straightforward and met all of our needs with no bells and whistles.”
From fledgling business to cult-favorite
Founded in 2008 by a husband-and-wife duo, Jenny Bird is fast becoming a household name within the fashion world and a cult-favorite among IT girls and celebrity stylists.
Focused on creating modern design-led jewelry for style-conscious women, the brand has seen explosive growth across its wholesale and ecommerce channels and is a desired brand within luxury fashion stores including Nordstrom, Fenwick and Harvey Nichols.
Like many other fledgling businesses, Jenny Bird relied on spreadsheets to manage its orders and inventory for many years.
Jenny Bird, CEO and Creative Director explains: “Like most start-ups, we had built a homegrown system in Excel, which we called ‘order central’ to track wholesale orders, delivery windows and incoming inventory. But as our business grew and became multichannel, it wasn’t possible to manage inventory properly, so we were missing out on sales and couldn’t scale. We got to $4m sales using Excel – but we should have switched to Brightpearl much sooner than that.”
Migrating to Brightpearl
But before that, Jenny Bird considered a large ERP provider to help the brand streamline its business. “We trialed another option first, but we thought it was overly complicated when we would probably only use about 5% of it. Plus the sales pitches were intense. We were trying to decide who to run our business with. We didn’t need a high pressure situation”, explains Jenny.
Jenny tells us that it was one of the Jenny Bird team members who brought Brightpearl to the brand’s attention, having used it at a previous company. After a deep dive into the product and value proposition, Brightpearl was thought to be a better fit for Jenny Bird.
“We’ve now been using Brightpearl for about 18 months. It’s so straightforward; I genuinely have no complaints. Our next growth milestones are $10m and $20m and Brightpearl is certainly robust enough to handle that,” says Jenny.
Gliding with style
The modern jewelry brand sells its pieces via two Shopify websites and 80 wholesale clients, as well as in its own retail store, which was opened in the fashion district of Toronto last fall.
“That’s why Brightpearl is so critical for us. It manages our five different inventories: retail, ecommerce, wholesale Canada, wholesale US and wholesale international. We’re now able to manage our wholesale demand against our inventory and hold it for future deliveries,” Bird says.
“Before we had Brightpearl, it was insane. We had to manage inventory, demand and forecasting for two separate locations and it became far too complicated. We would often try to guess which region and channel needed the most units and then we would shift the inventory around if a warehouse became depleted. With Brightpearl, we now have a proper planning and purchasing cycle and weekly forecast capabilities.”
Priti Kapoor, Senior Director of Finance and Operations at Jenny Bird agrees, saying: “Brightpearl has been life changing for us! Overall it has helped us implement more process and control checks in our day-to-day, has eliminated numerous elements of manual work and has increased our visibility to data and financials, which has helped us make better business decisions. Before Brightpearl, we didn’t have an accurate picture of our financials until after month end. Now, we can look at any point in time and get an accurate picture of our consolidated sales results.”
“We now have a speedier fulfillment process end-to-end, which wouldn’t have been possible before without additional headcount. We are now able to analyze quantities on hand, committed units, sell-through rates and more on a weekly basis, which has helped us improve our buying strategy,” continues Priti.
Priti concludes: “We’re also now able to track costs of goods sold, item by item, and as we’re now collecting historic data on this, we can make better pricing, design and markdown decisions. Not to mention all our platforms – Shopify, our 3PL with Bergen Logistics and our Joor wholesale platform – are now fully integrated with each other. Brightpearl has created a single source of truth for us.”
Soaring ahead
Jenny Bird has already established that it sees Brightpearl being a part of the brand’s future $10m and $20m goals.
To help the business reach those milestones, Bird says: “We’re currently using Brightpearl’s core features like inventory management, purchasing and orders. But I’m excited to use it more for intelligence, insights and reporting. We’ll be integrating it more into all our business decisions. It’s going to be our main feed of data – like it should be – for all our department reports. We’ve really only just begun with it.”
Key Facts
2
Shopify websites
2
3PL integrations, 1 retail store
50%
wholesale, 80 retailers