Having unified data was crucial for Southern lifestyle apparel brand, Draper James, a brand launched in 2015 by actress Reese Witherspoon.
As the brand grew in popularity, its fulfillment team found it difficult to meet buy-anywhere customer expectations. Draper James’ inventory management processes were time-consuming and error-prone, using inefficient manual workarounds in Excel. This held the company back from getting to know its customers better and from ensuring that what they wanted to buy was in-stock.
“When you are a startup and getting a brand going, you have to be on top of sales data, so you can recognize opportunities at the drop of a hat,” said Melissa Baird, Vice President of Systems and Procedures for Draper James. “We were missing out on opportunities to drive sales and grow our business.”
Draper James worked with Oracle + NetSuite to get an end-to-end view of the business across its wholesale distribution, ecommerce channels and three brick-and-mortar locations. It has enabled the brand to provide an omnichannel experience for both customers and retail partners.
“We had gotten to a place in the lifecycle that we were getting big and complicated, so we decided to put all of the data in one place,” said Baird.
A big part of delivering a great customer experience was making sure that any time Witherspoon was photographed wearing a Draper James item it was available immediately for purchase, addressing the immediate demand that followed.
“We really needed to have unified data to remove the barriers between the channels,” said Baird. “If a customer shopped in the Lexington store, and the only dress left in the network was in Nashville, we wanted to allow the customer the ability to easily purchase it from an iPad and have it delivered directly to the location of their choice.”
Draper James can now maintain flexible inventory and avoiding stock-outs. It can also focus on listening to customers, detecting patterns and focusing on adding value all along their purchasing journey.
Since working with Oracle+NetSuite, Draper James has created wholesale distribution partnerships with luxury retailers like Nordstrom and Net-a-Porter, and opened stores in Nashville, Dallas and Lexington.
Baird said the biggest result the brand has seen so far is its ability to pull and share data across the business in real time, and put controls around its processes.
“We can see the velocity of SKUs, and which channels are selling which products better,” she said.