Integrations accelerate Pangaia’s $100M+ sales hypergrowth

About

Pangaia, a UK-based clothing retailer established in 2019, experienced rapid growth when the business received endorsements from celebrities such as Bella Hadid, Kourtney Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez, and Justin Bieber. Online orders skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic with the increased demand for comfortable loungewear and online shopping. While the exponential increase in sales was positive, operations were beginning to crack under the volume.

“In the early days of the pandemic, our lounge and casual wear was extremely popular when people were stuck at home,” explained Matt Quelch, Head of IT at Pangaia. “We did over £130 million in revenue rapidly, but manual order processing and fragmented systems made it challenging to scale.”

The challenge

With a small IT team and limited resources, Pangaia found it increasingly hard to keep up. Customer experience started to suffer from order errors and incomplete data. The finance team constantly played catch-up, managing data discrepancies across sales channels.

“We onboarded a new ERP system to manage things, and the team would manually upload CSV files with order data. One wrong character in a client’s address, for example, was enough to create a cascade effect in our delivery and invoicing. Because there was no easy way to monitor errors, we wouldn’t find out about it until a customer complained they didn’t get their order,” Matt adds.

As the pandemic subsided and Pangaia looked to expand into new initiatives like retail stores and B2B, their existing infrastructure would not support additional growth.

The solution

Upon exploring integration solutions online, Matt came across the Celigo integration platform mentioned in a Reddit thread. Intrigued, he decided to give it a try. Seeing how quick and simple it was to work with, Pangaia with the help of their ERP implementation partner, GoLive Experts, adopted Celigo to connect and automate processes spanning multiple systems and departments.

“We implemented pre-built connectors and best practice templates to run things fast. Today, we’re using Celigo as our integration hub to connect Shopify, our e-commerce platform, and Joor, our B2B platform, to our ERP, and for various omnichannel FTP integrations,” said Matt. “This allows us to quickly automate manual tasks, all the way from the moment an order comes in, through fulfilment, to payment collection and returns management, without needing experienced coders.”

The results were transformative. IT productivity improved significantly as staff could self-serve integrations without starting from scratch every time. Debugging and issue resolution sped up with centralized data and visibility into errors. Finance also gained better transparency across channels, ensuring accuracy and compliance.

“It takes a fraction of the time to identify root causes for bugs and correct errors compared to our ad-hoc or custom-coded integrations,” Matt explained. “With Celigo, I can log into one dashboard to see errors, make tweaks, and retry flows. I get notified before anything breaks to prevent supply chain disruption or reputation issues with our clients. It’s very user-friendly.”

The bottom line

As business needs changed and new challenges & projects appeared, Celigo continued providing leverage, enabling rapid movement. Building and maintaining integrations is almost 90% faster than traditional coding and templates, ensuring Matt’s team never starts from scratch. Such agility and scalability enabled Pangaia to prepare for the next phase of omni-channel growth into retail stores.

“We smoothly launched a six-month retail pop-up store which would’ve been difficult before Celigo,” said Matt. “As we open our first flagship store, connecting data across channels is a huge advantage.”

With integrated technology, Pangaia is positioned to continue expanding on its own terms rather than being operationally constrained. Matt summarized, “Celigo allows our small team to support the business effectively. We’re empowered to take on new initiatives and touchpoints to fuel growth. For rapidly growing companies, Celigo provides an automation platform that scales. Instead of just surviving volume spikes, businesses can centralise data to unlock customer-focused agility, and innovation, and truly leverage an omnichannel strategy.”