This fashion seller finds Cin7 the street smart inventory management choice

Matt Newman was a graphic designer with a passion for printmaking when he “kind of just fell into” the fashion trade in 2008.

“I had a lot of good friends who were paid extreme sports athletes getting sponsorship,” Matt says. “I started making clothes for them, and they would be seen wearing it. That’s how it started.”

Surfing and wakeboarding athletes and fans quickly took notice of Matt’s custom-designed board shorts and T-shirts. Matt saw the potential of marrying his design passion with a new fashion brand, ONEBYONE.

From board shorts to a broader market

But Matt didn’t limit himself to sportswear. ONEBYONE soon developed a broad casual streetwear line with a fresh, distinct style governing each season’s release.

The brand’s early focus on brick-and-mortar and beach-side pop-up retail helped establish and build a brand reputation for quality clothes and timeless design.

“There are people that are still wearing a shirt from six years ago, and it’s still holding together,” Matt says. “That’s pretty cool: we’ve made something that the quality is good enough and the fashion current enough that they’re still comfortable wearing it.”

Messy processes, lost customers

ONEBYONE runs its own warehouse, and the way his small team managed orders and stock for their pop-ups, website and wholesale channels created serious issues, especially when they began selling on The Iconic marketplace.

“We managed all our stock using spreadsheets, and it was pretty messy,” Matt says. “We had orders being picked for retail partners, orders being picked for our pop-ups, and stock in the warehouse, and it was hard to know what stock there really was in the warehouse.”

Spreadsheets didn’t give them the real-time visibility and control they needed to keep up with their growth. They sometimes double-sold an item because they didn’t know they’d received orders from different channels for the same product. And that cost ONEBYONE customers.

“We definitely would have lost some customers along the way from not having stock,” Matt says. “They would have thought, ‘Well, I’m probably not going to buy from them again because they didn’t have it the first time.’”

Matt needed a better way to manage his business.

“Our system just wasn’t going to be sustainable for our growth,” he says. “Spending time updating spreadsheets, sorting out where our stock was: it was costing us a ton of time and money to do that.”

Cin7 Puts ONEBYONE on track for growth

ONEBYONE began using Cin7 in 2017. Its real-time stock visibility, integrated WooCommerce and The Iconic order processing, warehouse functionality and reporting give Matt the data he needs to efficiently manage stock and orders and eliminate double-selling.

“It talks to our website, talks to The Iconic, and that means the job of updating the quantities has been reduced a lot,” Matt says. “We don’t spend as much time worrying about where our stock is. Cin7 has helped our business to be streamlined and accountable.”

Matt and his team have also gone through a complete barcode labeling process that will let them do more pop-ups and run future warehouse sales.

“Now, if anyone was to purchase from our warehouse or a future pop up store, all we have to do is scan it,” Matt says.

And with Cin7’s reports, Matt has quick access to vital data about current stock.

“With the reports section, I can see what is selling, know what we’re running low of, all at a couple clicks of the button,” Matt says. “We could always get it from spreadsheets, but it wasn’t transparent, so Cin7 has saved us time every day.”

And Cin7 helps set the stage for future growth.

“The platform has made us feel comfortable enough to launch a sister brand and to set that up from the start with the right costs, the right landed costs, and to have it integrated right away with The Iconic.”