Stylerunner co-founder Julie Stevanja.
Aussie e-commerce startup stylerunner has deployed NetSuite in a bid to run its entire business from one unified Cloud commerce platform.
Twin sisters, Julie and Sali Stevanja, founded the business in October 2012, to provide a curated collection of coveted activewear for the "stylish consumer".
Since then, the company has grown faster than anticipated, quickly moving from 11 brands to almost 50 and shipping to 65 countries.
The company plans to expand globally, developing international distribution centres to improve inventory management and lower shipping expenses.
It is also planning to relaunch its StylerunnerMan website in 2015.
This exponential growth and the company’s imminent international expansion plans meant that Stylerunner needed to find a new platform to support its goals.
Over the past two years, Stylerunner has worked with multiple software systems - including a custom-built e-commerce site, accounting software, third party EDM providers, CRM systems and numerous Excel spreadsheets.
While these systems all delivered individually, there was a strong need for a collective solution that could deliver on all of its requirements in one central system, according to a company statement.
After evaluating a number of software solutions, Stylerunner turned to the NetSuite cloud.
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It replaced four software systems and numerous Excel spreadsheets.
It will now run its mission-critical business processes, including B2C ecommerce, financials, CRM, marketing, order management, inventory management, warehouse management, shipping and tax reconciliation – all on one single, unified software platform without the need for a big IT team and huge overheads. It also plans to rollout multi-currency, multi-language, and multi-retail websites.
Stylerunner co-founder, Julie Stevanja, said the success of the business was predicated on how well it anticipated and responded to the needs of its growing international customer base.
“NetSuite can enable us to carry out the detailed customer segmentation we need in order to do this," she said.
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"For example, we can create fields within our purchase orders to not only categorise by sales or product categories, but also by interests so we can analyse how profitable yoga apparel is versus running wear for example.
"We love that we can have that sort of data at our fingertips in a matter of moments as it can enable us to operate as a much more sophisticated and efficient company, far surpassing the insights that were previously available to us.”
She said the management team spent a lot of time travelling and working remotely so a cloud-based system was a prerequisite.
“Given the rapidity of our expansion, we need the flexible, access-anywhere architecture that NetSuite provides to be able to accommodate our medium-term growth plans, while guaranteeing simple and cost-effective add-on functionality as and when we expand into new territories and retail channels.”
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Netsuite APJ managing director, Mark Troselj, the startup was a great example of a dynamic, rapidly expanding entrepreneurial business that has realised how it can leverage the power of NetSuite’s cloud-based complete business management software to take its business to the next level.
"NetSuite can enable Stylerunner to replace siloed business systems with a complete business management and commerce solution that connects ecommerce to order management, inventory, merchandising, marketing, financials and customer service in one single and scalable instance, unveiling previously unattainable data integrity and granular and real-time business insights,” he said.
