License to thrill for beachwear retailer Orlebar Brown's system of record
- Summary:
- Integrating NetSuite’s OneWorld business management applications with its in-store POS systems has given staff across the Orlebar Brown a single view of this complex, multi-channel business.
A clever piece of product placement can do wonders for the profile of a small company. Just ask the management team at Orlebar Brown, the high-end beachwear brand behind the swimming shorts worn by Daniel Craig’s James Bond in the 2012 film, Skyfall.
How much this brief cameo appearance cost Orlebar Brown is a closely guarded secret. Heineken reportedly paid the makers of Skyfall a whopping £45 million to see Bond eschew his usual vodka martini, “shaken, not stirred”, in favour of its beer.
But either way, when James Bond donned Orlebar Brown’s sky-blue ‘Setter’ shorts in order to swim laps in the pool of a Shanghai hotel, his choice of attire attracted almost as much as attention among fashion journalists and bloggers as the rather snugger La Perla trunks he wore in 2006’s Casino Royale.
This was a major milestone in Orlebar Brown’s growth story. It was launched in 2007 and attracted revenues in its last financial year (ending 31 July 2013) of just under £8 million. In the current financial year, sales are expected to reach around £11 million.
Solid platform
The one thing a fast-growing company like this needs - especially one operating in the fickle world of fashion - is a solid platform of management software, according to senior IT manager Abi Somorin. But when he joined the company a year ago, that was not exactly what he found.
In fairness, the company’s OneWorld platform from NetSuite, implemented in 2011, had already done much to standardise processes and data across some core functions, but was still supplemented by a large number of other disparate applications for retail and marketing operations. “It was a bit of a mess,” he says.“My first and most fundamental recommendation was to make NetSuite the ‘system of record’ for Orlebar Brown, to give us a single view of data across different areas of this complex, multi-channel business,” says Somorin.
(The company makes around 40 of its sales online. A further 25 percent comes from its own bricks-and-mortar retail stores, with wholesale revenues derived from selling its products through major UK and US retailers such as Harrods, Selfridges and Nordstrom accounting for the remainder.)
With ambitious plans to open new stores, it was essential that retail operations were more closely tied into that NetSuite ‘system of record’. With serendipitous timing, NetSuite acquired retail point-of-sale (POS) specialist Retail Anywhere in January 2013, giving Somorin a clearer path to achieving the integration so badly needed.
Integrating NetSuite’s POS system with NetSuite OneWorld has given staff and merchandisers a complete view of the customer across all channels, and the POS system has also been integrated with a third-party iPad merchandising application already in use at retail stores to deliver a more personalised in-store experience to Orlebar Brown’s most loyal customers.
“It’s totally transformed working lives at Orlebar Brown, from staff in our retail stores to our board of directors,” says Somorin. If, for example, the merchandising team decides to put certain items on sale, they make the pricing changes in NetSuite OneWorld, and within 15 minutes, those changes are filtered through to the POS system that store managers use. “It’s immediately saved store managers hours of manual rekeying of pricing data,” he says. It also makes life a great deal easier for the back-office finance team who reconcile in-store transactions at the end of each day.
Flood of requests
In fact, Somorin’s biggest challenge now lies in responding to a flood of staff requests from all around the business for new
features, functions and integrations within NetSuite. The marketing team, he says, are particularly vocal about the uses they could find for the customer data hosted in the system, “but it’s a matter of being really strict about prioritising projects, based on business need,” he says.The upshot, however, is that getting new stores up and running is no longer the challenge it might once have been. In early May, Orlebar Brown upped its number of bricks-and-mortar stores from three to five, with the opening of branches in London’s Sloane Avenue and Floral Street. A pop-up store at the Bicester Village outlet mall in Oxfordshire is planned for the summer and the company may well open a store in New York during 2014.
“In the retail business, there’s no time for slacking at all. In a fast-growing company, you’ve got to keep up the pace. Combine the two, and you’re looking at a huge challenge - but it’s one that I think we can keep on top of now,” says Somorin.