Miansai Improves Processes and Customer Satisfaction With Celigo

About

In 2008 Michael Saiger created a bracelet as a bet with his girlfriend. Out of this single bracelet grew Miansai. Michael’s goal was to create masculine, utilitarian accessories that men could use, enjoy and wear out. In 2013, Miansai launched a similar line of accessories for women. Today, Miansai designs are sold around the world—in 40 US states and 36 countries—through its flagship store located in New York’s Soho neighborhood, a store in Venice Beach, and online.

Background

Until recently, Miansai sold most of their accessories wholesale to high-end retail department stores.

The multiple systems that they used to manage, track, invoice and ship orders were not integrated, meaning that there was a lot of manual work necessary to perform basic tasks. The manual activities were manageable when they were selling mostly wholesale, however, with the decline of retail department stores, they had to change their business operations to support more direct-to-consumer sales. They soon started selling their accessories through their own retail stores, as well through their website. But, the cumbersome manual processes being used to manage orders, fulfillment, inventory, and returns were no longer sustainable.

The challenge

To support the increase in direct-to-consumer sales, Christopher Veck, Chief Information Officer at Miansai, realized it was time to build a brand-new website and chose Shopify Plus as their enterprise e-commerce platform.

Miansai already used NetSuite to fulfill orders and Square as their point-of-sale (POS) solution. They also had plans to incorporate Returnly to manage their returns process. But, now that they had chosen Shopify and all of the individual applications, the real challenge became integration. How could they reduce or eliminate the manual work, errors and delays they had been experiencing due to a lack of integration between their previous systems?

Other concerns on Chris’ mind were that their business was still evolving, so whatever integration solution they ended up choosing had to be easy-to-use, adaptable, scalable and—most importantly of all—it had to be cloud-based.

The solution

After identifying all of his integration requirements and doing his research, there were several key factors that drew Chris to Celigo over other solutions:

• Proven experience and expertise with NetSuite integrations
• Prebuilt, fully managed Celigo NetSuite/Shopify Integration App integration
• Built on integrator.io, an iPaaS that provides a single platform for custom integrations, returns, and POS
• Ease-of-use: Integration Apps and integrator.io provide fast, easy deployment for businesses with limited resources
• Entirely cloud-based

Chris’ first and biggest need was to connect Shopify with NetSuite to handle orders, shipments, fulfillment, invoicing and inventory. But Chris understood that NetSuite integrations are very complex and not something just anyone can do well. So, he was leery of companies that said the integrations would be easy. After identifying all of his integration requirements and doing his research, there were several key factors that drew Chris to Celigo over other solutions.

“I know that no NetSuite integration is easy,” said Chris Veck, Chief Information Officer at Miansai. “But, Celigo took a very hard thing and actually made it look easy.”

The Celigo NetSuite/Shopify Integration App has allowed Miansai to not only reduce manual work and errors, but also speed up the rate at which the fulfillment team can get product out the door. “Thanks to the Celigo integrations, we’ve had a huge boost in customer satisfaction,” said Chris. “Any order received before 4:00pm is now going out that same day, whereas before, because of all the manual work, if the order was received after 9:00am it didn’t go out until the next day.”

Chris was also impressed with the speed at which the Celigo Shopify to NetSuite integration was implemented. “It took about 3 months, start-to-finish and we were actually sitting on Celigo for a month before we launched because it was done so quickly,” mused Chris. “The Celigo integrations were done before our website was finished.”

Another big selling point for Chris was that he could easily connect his new returns solution, Returnly, to Shopify thanks to Celigo integrator.io’s intuitive interface for creating integrations. This connection greatly improved their returns process. Said Chris, “My customer service people actually can’t believe how easy it is to do a return now. They initially thought there was something wrong because it was so easy.”

“Basically, in order to succeed, you need an automated way to get information from one application to another, quickly,” Chris explained. “And, as long as one of the applications can supply information, Celigo can get that information to where it needs to be. And, they make it painless.”

Bottom line

Chris has some big plans for his new website. As direct-to-consumer and online sales grow, he wants to increase and improve his use of Shopify.

But, he’s no longer worried about how he’s going to integrate the new applications that he’s sure to need. “One of the great things is that as we grow our business and continue to upgrade what Shopify can do, Celigo can scale right along with us,” said Chris. “All I have to do is add a sales channel and once it comes into Shopify, Celigo takes care of the rest.”