The UK’s fastest growing business, women’s gym wear brand AYBL, has optimised its stock and inventory management globally through integrating Patchworks’ Stockr across multiple Shopify stores, generating 100% order accuracy as well as saving time, money, and boosting customer loyalty.
AYBL’s premium sportswear has soared in popularity since brothers Reiss and Kristian Edgerton founded the company from their spare room in 2018. The global brand has inspired fitness journeys around the world and its reputation is principally founded on its exceptional online customer experience. In addition to experiencing skyrocketing growth this decade, the fast-growing business has had to navigate extreme spikes of orders in peak retail periods, which proves a monumental challenge for its tech infrastructure to cope with.
AYBL were urgently seeking to eliminate overselling during peak periods. With six separate Shopify stores all sharing the same stock pool, the loungewear brand was inadvertently advertising six times its available stock and ran the risk of over- or under-selling, with potential impact on revenue and reputation. The sluggish legacy technology linking its Shopify platform and WMS that ineffectively synched stock further compounded the issue. At one point the business was forced to refund £300,000 worth of orders impacting approximately 7,000 customers.
AYBL approached Patchworks for its Stockr real-time stock management solution, which had been designed specifically for another fast-growing fashion brand facing similar difficulties. Stockr is a stock control ‘live service’ product, which unifies a company’s Shopify stores to optimise stock-based management decisions. In unifying the stock pool across multiple Shopify stores, Stockr ensures that when items sell out in one, the website can draw from a single pool of stock, avoiding the common problems of both overselling and underselling.
Now using Stockr, with inventory levels updated within milliseconds (almost real-time), AYBL’s customers are afforded 100% order accuracy, being prevented from checking out with an unfulfillable order, and averting the need for a refund – a boon to both AYBL and its customers. In fact, Stockr gives AYBL such certainty in their stock data that even during peak periods, their oversells have been reduced by 90% across all stores worldwide.
Reiss Edgerton, CEO of AYBL said: “Spiralling sales isn’t a great thing without the foundations of effective stock management, and before Stockr’s implementation, we were almost one step forward and two back in busy retail periods. We’ve experienced the huge impact that mis-selling can have on revenue and customer loyalty. Patchworks’ Stockr has empowered us with real-time understanding of stock location and status, and we have consistent support from the Patchworks tech pros. This gives our store associates the right information to respond accurately to customer queries, to cross- and up-sell – and we’re building bigger revenue as a result. It’s been a real experience to see our record Black Friday orders processed without a hitch.”
Jim Herbert, CEO of Patchworks said: “Over- and under-selling probably rank as the most serious threats to revenue, aside from returns. Many brands learn the hard way, suffering lost revenue, customer loyalty and even knock-on effects such as decreased store associate satisfaction. AYBL’s turnaround in stock management is critical to the brand’s continued success and future development. This means that AYBL can continue their incredible growth journey without fear of overselling. And if this means further stores or geographical expansion, Stockr and the Patchworks iPaaS are right behind them to help them scale.”
