How Cin7 helped create a glorious future for this gaming product seller

Shazim Mohammad, founder of Glorious, knew he had a great idea for a product other gamers would love. He started with a 3XL mousepad, and soon followed with a transition into more serious gaming electronics: the fully-customisable GMMK mechanical gaming keyboard combined functionality with an incredible price point. Gamers loved it, and on the back of this early success, Glorious began to think about what should come next.

“We do a lot of R&D to put out great products, but we make it so the average gamer can afford them – it’s not super expensive when you compare it to our competitors, and in terms of what you get, it’s a lot more bang for your buck,” says Glorious Director of Operations, Greg Nutter.

Greg is a long-time PC gamer, who says people are often surprised when he tells them about what he likes to do in his spare time. As a hard-core sports fan, he doesn’t fit the gamer stereotype. But, he says, gaming is now very much a mainstream hobby, with gamers now appearing in every demographic — and his love for gaming has helped him excel in his job.

“It can’t be understated. You have to be passionate about the products you’re selling. I came into the company with that passion,” he says.

Glorious grew rapidly year on year thanks to this passion for product. But after a few years, they decided to step things up again.

“We saw an opportunity to break into the gaming mouse market – our competitors were, frankly, overcharging for gaming mice, and we saw an opportunity to create a mouse that was on-par or better than what was currently offered, and make it half the price. And that changed everything for us,” Greg says.

The only thing holding them back was their inventory management.

Getting ready for an inventory systems upgrade

The business had been using Stitch Labs for inventory management since the early days, and it had worked well enough while the company was small. But with their company experiencing rapid growth — and with their plans for much greater scale — Glorious found that Stitch Labs wasn’t up to the task.

“Stitch Labs worked with the order volume that we had at the beginning, when we were getting 15 to 20 orders a day” Greg says.

“But as our business started to grow, and scale, we saw a lot of limitations.”

Glorious, Greg says, needed a partner who could help them grow the way they wanted to. For them, that partner was Cin7.

Switching from Stitch Labs to Cin7

The Glorious team had several requirements for a new inventory management system implementation. They wanted better inventory management, better reporting, and the ability to better serve customers by fulfilling orders based on customer location.

In the beginning, Glorious had just one warehouse in Salt Lake City, and with customers all over the United States, some would receive orders quickly while others experienced long transit times. Glorious wanted to understand their order volume geographically, so they needed to be able to expand their third-party logistics (3PL) locations to where most of their orders were coming from.

“We wanted to be able to reach out to our customers and provide better service and turnaround times for orders, expand the warehouse network, and doing that under Stitch Labs just wasn’t feasible,” Greg says.

They discovered Cin7 from a Google search, and quickly booked a demo with the sales team.

“Your team explained what was available to us, what Cin7 could and couldn’t do, and we were able to decide that Cin7 was probably the best fit for us,” Greg says. “There’s other platforms out there, like SAP and things like that, but we weren’t exactly [that big] yet, and they’re super expensive as well. So Cin7 was the perfect fit.”

Happily, the process of switching to Cin7 was “pretty seamless.” During the transition from Stitch Labs, the Glorious team talked daily with their onboarding consultant Cyran Castelino, who walked the team step-by-step through what needed to happen. If something wasn’t working, all it took was a call to fix it.

“You guys provided the support that was necessary to ensure that it was a seamless transition,” Greg says.

“We had the onboarding process with Cin7, everything was explained to us, and there was definitely some hand-holding there, which we appreciated. There was maybe a day or two of downtime while we set this stuff up. But once we had it up and running, things have never been better. We were happy with the switch, for sure.”

Results from the Cin7 implementation

Glorious’ new Cin7 integration allowed them to quickly grow their logistics operation from one to three different warehouses, as well as setting up a specific warehouse in Hong Kong to handle their global distribution partners. Cin7’s Fulfilment By Amazon integration has been “really good” for Glorious as well, Greg says. It’s enabled them to pull shipments from Amazon FBA, properly documented, from their existing inventory.

What’s more, Cin7 has also given them the ability to bring all their inventory data together under one umbrella, and run comprehensive reports that give them the ability to spot new opportunities quickly.

The result? “Growth has been explosive,” Greg says.

Glorious are now selling and shipping thousands of orders each day, and their revenue has skyrocketed. When Greg started in the job, it was still a two or three-person operation. A little over a year later the team has grown to nearly 40 employees.

“Cin7 has allowed us to get to the point where we are now,” Greg says. “What we’ve been able to accomplish from when I first joined, to now — it’s just been tremendous. Seeing the products that we’ve put out there, and then the products that we have in development, is super exciting. The growth has been the biggest payoff. It’s been amazing.”

Enabling — and getting — great customer service with Cin7

Greg says that their Cin7 implementation has also allowed Glorious to vastly improve their customer service. They hired a full-time developer that they put in charge of API integrations between Cin7 and their 3PL warehouses. From this, they were able to create their own custom dashboard that their customer service representatives could use. They called this custom dashboard the Nexus.

“Our customer service agents have access to the data out of Cin7, so when customers are calling about different issues, it’s a one-stop shop for the agents to be able to login and see things like what the customer ordered, when their order was placed — so if they need to send a replacement order, they can just look at the inventory available. It’s a good tool for our customer service agents to have when they’re dealing with customer order inquiries on the fly,” Greg says.

“They can look up a SKU, or type in a serial number, and they’ll see what shipment it was on, and what customers are associated with it. And as far as handling our increased order volume, it’s now in the thousands each day, and we haven’t had any issues. The orders come in, they go out, and it’s worked flawlessly so far. Everything works the way we wanted it to.”

Greg says that Cin7 has both enabled and provided excellent customer service.

“The support has been right there to help us along. When we’ve had issues with Cin7, the ticket gets placed, and they’re usually handled within 24 to 48 hours, which is a reasonable time frame,” Greg says. “It’s so much easier for us to get solutions and fixes done by Cin7’s support team.”

The upside of down

Even as the Covid-19 pandemic has devastated entire industries, others are booming.

Since the pandemic began, work-from-home has become the new norm, and the demand for PC peripherals has gone through the roof, even as e-commerce has grown.

“Business is booming,” Greg says. “People aren’t all going into the big box stores anymore, they’re on Amazon and other websites, to get products straight away. We expected this year to be a fairly successful one, but Covid has actually led to an increase in sales for us. We saw Black Friday levels in April of this year. It’s been huge. Obviously, we’d like it to go away and for things to get back to normal, but at the same time, the boost to e-commerce sales has been hard to ignore.”

Cin7’s cloud-based nature has also had another unlikely effect: it’s enabled many of the team in this product-based business to work from home.

“We’ve been working from home since February, and we’ve been able to keep our operations running smoothly,” Greg says.

Looking forward to the future with Cin7

It’s all looking positive for the future of Glorious. With a firm foundation for their inventory management in Cin7, they’re keen to grow their fulfilment network, and better serve their international customers as well. And they say their journey with Cin7 is still just beginning.

“We’re seeing thousands of orders per day, and we’ve been able to handle it without a hitch,” Greg says. “I haven’t seen anything that would indicate that Cin7’s not able to handle our order volume. It’s definitely allowed us to grow the way we wanted.”

Glorious set Cin7 up with a vision of where they saw their business going in terms of order volume, and they wanted something in place to be able to handle that — to grow with them, as they bring on more inventory and more orders.

“I’d recommend it to anyone that was looking to switch software,” Greg says. “If you’re looking to scale your business, looking to expand your offerings, and looking for an easier way to manage inventory and ensure you have a platform that can handle increased order volume, Cin7 is the way to go.”

“They’ve been there for us, they’ve grown with our business, and ultimately they’ve been the solution that’s allowed us to grow and to get to the point where we are now.”