Dylan’s Candy Bar Achieves Double-Digit Revenue Growth

NetSuite Inc. a provider of cloud-based financials / ERP and omnichannel commerce software suites, announced that Dylan’s Candy Bar, the largest state-of-the-art sweets emporium and candy lifestyle brand, has achieved double-digit revenue growth since deploying NetSuite to replace multiple legacy on-premise systems including Sage MAS 90, JDS Solutions WinRetail and a custom-built warehouse management system.

Dylan’s Candy Bar relies on NetSuite to manage its mission-critical business processes, including financials, inventory and order management, warehousing and customer relationship management (CRM). As a result of this modernization effort, Dylan’s Candy Bar now has a platform to support rapid growth, streamline business operations and fulfill its mission to transform the brand experience for shoppers.

Founded in 2001, Dylan’s Candy Bar merges the worlds of art, fashion and pop culture with candy at its retail stores across the country and on its website. As the business prospered, disparate, on-premise legacy applications were hampering its growth. These application silos limited visibility into the business, required cumbersome and error-prone manual work that impacted efficiency and left the business without a single source of reliable, real-time data. Additionally, struggles with multi-location inventory management and a lack of customer insight hindered the business from providing an innovative, omnichannel shopping experience.

Dylan’s Candy Bar considered expanding its legacy applications with add-on solutions but ultimately decided to shift its IT strategy to the cloud, eliminating the significant cost to maintain its in-house IT resource requirements for maintenance, backups, upgrades and troubleshooting.

“With NetSuite, we’ve undertaken radical change to transform the shopping experience at Dylan’s Candy Bar and bring joy and wonder to our customers’ lives,” said Erica Stevens, VP of Supply Chain and IT. “The insights we gain from a single source of data are profound and provide a data- and relationship-driven approach to serving our customers.”

IT modernization fosters rapid growth

Since implementing NetSuite, Dylan’s Candy Bar has transformed into a more agile and efficient operation. The company can better enable all fundamental business processes and access real-time information on demand, empowering Dylan’s Candy Bar to rapidly expand its brand and continue disrupting the candy industry. As a result, the company has been able to more than double its retail locations from four flagship stores and three licensed shops to what will be 16 flagship and licensed locations in January 2016.

“Before NetSuite, we didn’t have the insight into our business that was needed to innovate and grow,” Stevens said. “We really needed the unified system that NetSuite provides to capitalize on our momentum.”

Other benefits Dylan’s Candy Bar enjoys as a result of moving to NetSuite include:

Personalized, cross-channel marketing. Dylan’s Candy Bar has more than doubled the size of its customer database. With NetSuite’s CRM solution, the company has a central hub of all customer information from across multiple channels, and uses that insight to deploy personalized, cross-channel marketing programs. For example, in-store sales associates are able to promote its loyalty program to the millions of customers who visit Dylan’s physical stores to help drive additional sales online.

Efficient order management. The company has centralized its order management with NetSuite, resulting in a 66 percent decrease in ecommerce order processing times. Yet, order volumes have risen 32 percent over the same period.

Reduced inventory discrepancies. Dylan’s Candy Bar cut inventory discrepancies by 65 percent through a single system of record for all inventory movement – purchasing, warehousing and sales.

Expanded retail partnerships. With NetSuite and an EDI solution from NetSuite partner SPS Commerce, Dylan’s Candy Bar has bolstered relationships and streamlined transactions with its retail partners including Nordstrom, Barnes & Noble and Neiman Marcus.