Stubble & Co Secures Multi-Million Pound Investment After Brightpearl Overhaul

A multi-million cash injection from a reputable investor tops the wish list of most growing retail brands.

After all, it’s the key to unlocking growth, expanding reach and enhancing product offerings.

However, to attract investors brands must have their operations in order.

Along with a clear strategy and a proven track record of sales, streamlined operations signal to investors that a business is logistically poised to scale and is managed efficiently in order to maximise profits.

As a leading retail operating system, Brightpearl by Sage transforms operations at fast-growing brands, saving time, turbocharging profits and boosting ‘investor appeal’ at the same time.

A case in point? Stubble & Co, a fast-growing lifestyle brand.

This British bag brand, which has bucked all retail trends to achieve sustained double-digit growth over the last three years, joined Brightpearl after learning that it was the operating system behind the success of fellow lifestyle brand Passenger.

Unpacking overcomplicated operations

Co-founder Ben Watkiss says: “Keeping our business as simple as possible is a strategic priority, however with rapid international growth and an increasingly diverse supply chain, our operations inevitably became complex.

“Brightpearl has been a turning point for Stubble & Co, as it streamlines and removes human intervention across most of our order and inventory management processes enabling us to accurately forecast demand for a growing range of products across multiple channels in multiple regions     .

“It became impossible to manage on spreadsheets – it was taking us endless hours every week and was such a manual process.

“When I read that Passenger runs on Brightpearl, I was keen to understand how they could support us with tackling our operational complexity head-on.”

After an expert-led implementation which took just three months including training, Brightpearl synced seamlessly with Stubble & Co’s Shopify-powered online store thanks to a flawless Plug & Play integration. Brightpearl is also proud to be a certified Shopify Partner, offering merchants a winning combination of solutions to support rapid growth.

Buckling up for success

Critically, the firm has eliminated many of its manual processes, including across order processing, shipping and invoicing, thanks to Brightpearl’s powerful Automation Engine which enables merchants to easily and quickly automate key workflows without any complicated coding required.

“We’re saving hours and hours every week since automating so many of our processes with the Automation Engine,” says Ben.

“We’re also saving so much time from boosting our productivity with automation. There’s no way we could be without it now.

“We love that Brightpearl syncs so easily to our Shopify store – in our opinion, this is one of the things that makes Brightpearl such a perfect solution for fast-scaling retailers looking for a unified tech stack.

“We’ve been able to streamline our order and inventory management processes, making our business faster, more joined up and more nimble.

“It’s been a game changer.”

Multi-million pound investment? It’s in the bag

Since overhauling its operations with Brightpearl, Stubble & Co has been able to achieve even more impressive results – most notably a ‘multi-million pound’ investment from consumer-specialist investment firm Growth Partner, backed by HomeServe founder and chairman Richard Harpin.

The team hope this investment will allow the brand to position itself as a global e-commerce frontrunner with aspirations of surpassing 100 million pounds in annual sales.

“We’re saving hours and hours every week since automating so many of our processes with Brightpearl’s Automation Engine” – Ben Watkiss, Co-founder, Stubble & Co

Ben adds: “We’re exceptionally proud to have built Stubble & Co into a 10-million-pound profitable brand without outside investment, but we also believed the right partner will help us grow further and faster.

“As our growth continued to accelerate after joining Brightpearl, it was the perfect time to bring in this major investment to support the next phase of our development. Since signing up, we haven’t looked back.”

Find out how Brightpearl can help your business grow fearlessly with a free demo.