How Pimsical Helped Charcoal Clothing Scale Seamlessly from Clicks to Bricks

Industry

Apparel & Fashion

Website

charcoalclothing.com.au

Key Platforms

Shopify & POS • PeopleVox WMS • Lightspeed Vend

Pimsical Apps

Warehouse Integration • Stock Take

Charcoal Clothing's story

1. The Challenge: Growth brings complexity
2. The Solution: Pimsical's Seamless Integrations
3. Results: Operations, Optimised

Founded in Queensland, Australia in 2016, Charcoal Clothing is a fast-growing fashion brand. Their design focus is inspired by our team of women - different from each other, drawn together by a shared sense of style. By designing pieces their team feel confident in, they have in turn designed for the modern woman; A woman who is effortless, confident, and classic.

Starting as an online Shopify store, they grew rapidly into an omnichannel business. Expanding their warehouse footprint and to six physical retail stores across Australia.

However, this expansion came with some growing pains, trying to manage inventory efficiently and accurately across these separate locations, ensuring an increasing number of orders were picked, packed, and shipped quickly and accurately.

The Challenge: Growth brings complexity

Summary

• Manual fulfilment process: paper picking lists leading to slower fulfilment and increased risk of errors.
• Disconnected Retail operations: using Lightspeed Vend for retail and Shopify for online orders, leading to fragmented customer data and loyalty management.
• Data silos: customer loyalty, product data, and sales split across systems, requiring constant CSV exports and imports.
• Limited visibility: stock takes were infrequent and manual, leading to inefficiencies and inaccurate inventory.

The Story

Charcoal Clothing had grown up on Shopify, the team were using third party apps for shipping goods, but this meant printing paper pick lists, leading to slower shipping speeds and occasional mistakes when picking from these paper lists.

Charcoal Clothing needed a solution to help them keep pace with growth and continue to improve operational efficiency for online orders. Without relying on a dedicated tech team or costly integration, taking weeks or months to implement.

Alongside this the retail stores were feeling disconnected and hopping between different systems and apps. Using Lightspeed Vend in their retail stores and Shopify for online orders meant staff having to login to different systems and apps, customers’ information was partly in Vend or partly in Shopify depending on where they had purchased, product data was also a case of moving CSV files around, making it slow and time consuming. This also meant managing customer loyalty was also a headache, copying points between systems, hoping between apps, and customer experience suffering.

The Solution: Pimsical's Seamless Integrations

Summary

• Out of the box integration: Pimsical Warehouse integration connects Shopify & Peoplevox in minutes, no tech team required.
• Total control: Pimsical Warehouse integration gives you complete control over what you want to synchronise and even a test mode to ensure everything works before going live.
• Full system synchronisation: products, orders, inventory, and fulfilments all synchronised seamlessly between Shopify and PeopleVox.
• Retail operations streamlined: Shopify POS and Pimsical Stock Take app provide a unified solution for retail operations and stock management.

The Story

Charcoal Clothing came across PeopleVox, a powerful Warehouse Management System (WMS) and specialist in Apparel brands previously having worked with Gymshark amongst others.

But this left them with the question of how to seamlessly integrate Shopify and PeopleVox, without a technical team, on a short timeline to keep pace with growth and at a reasonable price point.

This is where Pimsical enters the story, with a Warehouse Integration designed to seamlessly integrate Shopify and PeopleVox. Doing so without weeks or months of integration discussions, questions about schemas or other technical talk. It handles the integration, so you can get on with running your business.

With our Warehouse Integration app, Charcoal Clothing were able to get set up in a few minutes, ready for testing. With a tick of a button, they were able to turn on test mode and synchronise orders down into their test warehouse, no waiting for a developer to run something or someone else to have to step in, Charcoal Clothing were in control of their integration and business. Running this testing is critical to ensure they were comfortable with all the systems before they came online, a critical step in any large changes to business processes. From there the PeopleVox team scheduled their go live date!

With Charcoal Clothing in Australia, the PeopleVox team spread across the globe and Pimsical in the UK. I woke up early for the go-live call. It turned out Charcoal Clothing had it all in hand, with our seamless warehouse integration giving them full control. They enabled orders to be synchronised from Shopify to the warehouse and inventory and fulfilments back to Shopify. By the time we woke up for the go live call, they had already picked, packed, and were dispatching the orders as we spoke, we could see the deliveries being rolled away behind them! This really showed the power of a well-oiled operation.

We couldn’t have done this warehouse migration without Pimsical

Once they had the warehouse under control, next up was the retail headaches. It was clear running different disconnected systems was harming business and not providing the amazing customer experience Charcoal Clothing aims to provide.

We demonstrated Shopify POS to the team, answering questions about how it would work with the different in-store processes, device management and wider business operations.

It also meant the team needed to change their stock taking process, previously using Vend. They needed a fast simple solution where each store manager could run and operate their own stock takes, accept stock into store in a regular and controlled process and ensure they have an overview across all the retail stores.

Results: Operations, Optimised

All these systems working in harmony with the Charcoal Clothing team has transformed operations, helping them run like a well-oiled machine. Whether its across online ecommerce operations, through to retail operations. Pimsical is here to help.

Warehouse Operations

• 300,000+ orders seamlessly synchronised and fulfilled to date.
• Tens of thousands of product updates and inventory updates synchronised monthly.
• Real time sync between Shopify and PeopleVox, ensuring accurate stock levels and fast fulfilment.

Retail Operations

• 1,300+ stock takes successfully completed across retail stores in the last year.
• 500,000+ units adjusted across stores, ensuring accurate inventory levels.
• 45+ different retail devices used for stock takes.

Business Impact

• Countless hours saved on manual processes, no longer moving CSV and data between systems manually.
• Accurate Inventory less oversells, improved understanding of costs and better customer experience.
• Real Omnichannel Experience powered by unified data and seamless integrations across platforms.

We don't stop there: Stay ahead with Pimsical

With Shopify releasing a new Transfer Orders experience. We were ready and already integrated this across our Pimsical applications. We were able to demonstrate to our customers how they can use this to further improve operational performance by using Transfers seamlessly across Shopify, PeopleVox and retail locations!

Platforms, especially Shopify, are always evolving. Your integration & app partners should be ahead of the curve, helping you keep up and take advantage of the change. Helping to grow your business, improve efficiency and optimise your operations.

Pimsical is here to help you do just that, with our apps and integrations designed to help you grow your business, not slow it down or leave you with outdated processes.

Ready to level up like Charcoal Clothing?

Whether you are opening your first warehouse, or opening your fifth retail store, Pimsical is here to help you scale your operations seamlessly. Get in touch, we would love to chat!