AUSTIN, TX, Feb. 2, 2020 — BALA Footwear has chosen Brightpearl and Shopify to help bring its new innovative footwear for nurses to market for the first time.
The Portland-based startup, founded by a team of Nike alumni, creates premium footwear designed specifically for nurses on long shifts.
The team spent 2019 interviewing hundreds of nurses across the U.S. to understand their footwear needs and began designing the flagship product, BALA Twelves, in January 2020. During the following 12 months the team finalized the product, tested it with a team of 50 nurses, closed $2M in equity financing and executed a pre-sale on WeAreBALA.com that yielded $1M in sales in 12 days. The team’s stated mission is to show nurses the same level of care and respect they show their patients everyday.
To scale quickly BALA Footwear needed an ecommerce platform and flexible digital operations that would seamlessly integrate and manage the firm’s end-to-end workflows.
The brand opted to combine the power of Brightpearl at the heart of operations and Shopify’s ecommerce software powering the online store – meaning the business was up and running in just eight weeks.
Brightpearl’s digital operations platform will act as a centralised source of truth, providing BALA Footwear with total visibility and control over its stock levels, a real time view of inventory, sales and reporting for data-driven decision making, and the ability to automate its entire operation, from the moment the customer places an order, all the way through to shipping and returns.
The brand’s ecommerce store has been built with Shopify which gives it the ability to sell and market the company’s business online with ease.
In selecting Brightpearl as its digital operations platform, BALA Footwear joins a long line of retail brands who are recognizing that flexible operations are key to commercial success from the outset, and Brightpearl’s all-in-one retail solution gives the brand the ability to scale quickly and efficiently across markets and channels.
Alongside the firm’s core requirements, the world-class integrations that come pre-built with Brightpearl, including Klaviyo, an email marketing platform, and Shipstation, a 3PL provider, made it the obvious choice to support the firm’s mission to provide the country’s incredible nurses with long-lasting and fashionable footwear.
“To reach and serve nurses everywhere, operations must be an enabler for our growth strategies,” said BALA Co-Founder Brian Lockard. “In Brightpearl and Shopify we have selected partners that enable us to accelerate quickly into new growth channels.’.
“We’re delighted to be powering BALA Footwear right from the outset of their journey” said Justin Press, Brightpearl’s SVP of Customer Success. “More and more brand’s are opting for Brightpearl and Shopify when considering the direct-to-consumer space because they understand this channel is going to expand past what they previously had. Having a true end-to-end retail solution in place becomes essential for scalability, as well as delivering on customer expectations for exceptional speed, convenience and outstanding customer service.
“Attempting to go live so quickly with new technology partners during the holiday season might put off many businesses, but BALA Footwear trusted Brightpearl’s record for lightning quick implementation and reliable out-of-the-box integrations, meaning the firm’s online store, its operations and 3PL were firing on all cylinders from day one.”
About Brightpearl
Brightpearl is the number one digital operations platform (DOP) for the retail and wholesale sector. Built to manage the complexity of modern business, the scalable platform offers insights for fast decision-making, the flexibility to respond to rapid changes in demand and smooth integrations with other core operational systems within the organisation.
Brightpearl’s complete DOP solution includes financial management, inventory and sales order management, purchasing and supplier management, CRM, fulfillment, warehouse and logistics. Brightpearl’s configurable automation workflows also have measurable time and cost saving impact for our customers, allowing them to focus more resources on growing the business. In addition, the solution has high-performing connectors to the major ecommerce platforms, including Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce.
1,000 retail businesses from across the world use our platform and we manage over 10m transactions and $3bn of business a year. Our team guides retail businesses through a highly efficient implementation process which typically gets them up and running in less than 60 days – twice as fast as our competitors.
Brightpearl’s US headquarters is in the heart of downtown Austin with a global headquarters in Bristol, UK. You can connect with us on Twitter (@BrightpearlHQ), LinkedIn (linkedin.com/company/Brightpearl), and Facebook (facebook.com/brightpearl).
Media contact:
Mark Hook
Nick Ward