Titan Brands grows 10x over five years while automating processes across its entire operations with Celigo

About

Titan Brands is an online-based retailer of consumer and business goods, with four brands that specialize in commercial and farm attachments, loading ramps, fitness equipment, and various outdoor items. Today Titan Brands sell over 3,000 different products to businesses and consumers across the US and Canada.

Background

Titan Brands started originally selling ramps and attachments. As they quickly grew and orders increased, the company needed to move away from manual order processing. In 2013, they procured a solution to help automate their processes across different ecommerce channels.

In the first automation push, the team selected ChannelAdvisor to automate order processing between Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and its newly-implemented NetSuite ERP.

The challenge

Titan Brands grew from 50 SKUs to over 3000 as they added fitness and outdoor brands to the portfolio, accelerating their double-digit growth with over 3,000 orders a day. It soon became clear that the ChannelAdvisor solution was not meeting their challenges.

First, as the business matured, the need for customization only increased. “We have some unique business requirements on how we do things,” said Hill. “There’s a lot of customization needed depending on the channel that it’s on, and we didn’t have the ability with our solution.”

Moreover, ChannelAdvisor’s business model was becoming unpredictably expensive for Titan. Because ChannelAdvisor charged by transaction volume, the company’s costs increased during high-volume periods. Titan Brands’ costs began to skyrocket, and the team felt their contract penalized them if they were successful.

In 2016, Titan Brands decided it was time to procure a different solution.

The solution

Titan Brands chose Celigo to replace ChannelAdvisor as the middleware platform across its entire ecommerce and supply chain operations. They did so because of Celigo’s customizability, centralized management and dashboarding, and a business model that didn’t charge by transaction.

The company started by leveraging Celigo’s prebuilt integrations with multiple online marketplaces to NetSuite, including Amazon, eBay, and Walmart. This enabled them to accurately update pricing, inventory, listings, sales, returns, and to provide near real-time data to customers.

With the successful implementation of the marketplace integrations, and as orders grew to over one million annually, Titan Brands expanded its use of the Celigo platform to automate additional processes across its supply chain and broader organization, especially around the ERP.

The company integrated Salesforce Marketing Cloud and later Klaviyo to automate all transactional and customer journey emails, enhancing the customer experience.

Titan integrated its payroll system, Paylocity, with Azure Active Directory to automate employee onboarding and offboarding. By using Paylocity as the master employee record, the HR team could update the employee list and the integration would automatically trigger Azure to create or remove accounts from various company applications.

As the company continued its meteoric growth, it needed better insights to manage and analyze its data for better business decisions. Titan adopted Snowflake as its data warehouse and Domo as its Business Intelligence solution, leveraging Celigo for integrations from applications into Snowflake, such as support ticket information from Zendesk.

Other integrations included feed-tracking with Aftership, rewards with Yotpo, EDI, and more.

Bottom line

Not only was Titan able to meet their integration and automation needs, but the company realized immediate savings when switching to Celigo. “The integration alone saves us 3-5 full-time people to doing it manually,” said Hill. “At our volume, if we were still with our previous integration provider, that would cost us $240,000 – $400,000 for the same thing. So that’s a quarter-million-dollar saving right there.”

More importantly, the company implemented a scalable solution that is flexible, customizable, along with being a powerful platform that doesn’t require deep technical resources to manage on a daily basis.

“Over the last several years we’ve been trying to make sure our technology can be used, updated, and changed by the end-user,” said Hill. “That’s one of the big things about Celigo: there are the simple processes that can be managed by the end-user, but also the high-end tools for the more technical, developer-type users.”

“We’ve been able to set up processes and monitor processes ourselves, in the way that we needed it to be, as opposed to having to use a cookie-cutter approach,” he added.

Celigo has also helped Titan improve customer satisfaction and make better decisions by having better visibility into its data – without a lot of resources to manage everything.

“Celigo has helped us grow our business 10x over the last five years by letting us concentrate our core competencies. They’ve allowed regular business users to automate and manage the different tasks without having to have a lot of IT experience, while still giving the ability to automate the more advanced processes for the people who are more comfortable doing that,” said Hill. “Most importantly, it’s helped us get near real-time information across our systems, which really has given us the insights to make decisions in the moment on what to do. We display that information to every employee to answer the questions of where we are at and what we have to do next.”