Draper James has inked a deal with Oracle NetSuite for use of the technology firm’s cloud-based omnichannel software platforms to help create a better shopping experience for consumers while also increasing efficiencies across its retail business.
The retailer, founded by Reese Witherspoon, deployed NetSuite’s Retail Apparel Edition in June and fully implemented the technology in 144 days using NetSuite’s “SuiteSuccess,” which is “a methodology designed to deliver faster time to value, increased business efficiency, flexibility and greater customer success,” the companies said.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
NetSuite said its SuiteSuccess approach leverages the company’s “depth of experience in the retail industry and business operations functionality.” This included use of “preconfigured dashboards for retail-specific roles and reports with business intelligence for retailers” that helps to provide insights into “top-selling items, units per transaction, shrink reports, sales per hour, sell-through figures and retail stock-ledger.”
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Draper James said it was not able to fully meet the expectations of the “buy-anywhere customer” with its former inventory management processes. It was time-consuming and error-prone, the retailer said, adding that it included “inefficient manual workarounds in Excel.”
“Disparate systems held the company back from getting to know its customers better, and from ensuring that what they wanted to buy was in stock,” NetSuite said. “It knew sustainable, efficient growth depended on managing and maintaining flexible inventory across channels.”
NetSuite allows financials, inventory, customer and order management processes to be operated under one system. Melissa Baird, vice president of systems and procedures for Draper James, said the company “really needed to have unified data to remove the barriers between channels. If a customer shopped in the Lexington store, and the only dress left in the network was in Nashville, we wanted to allow the customer the ability to easily purchase it from an iPad and have it delivered directly to the location of their choice.”
Witherspoon founded Draper James in 2015 “as a tribute to her Southern heritage and gracious Southern living, and in particular her grandparents, William James Witherspoon and Dorothea Draper — who never left the house without her pearls or wedding ring and always drove her white Cadillac with the proper driving gloves,” the companies noted. Witherspoon’s fame required the company to scale its operations across “expanding channels, which included e-commerce, plans to open brick-and-mortar locations and engage in B2B partnerships with leading retailers.”
Draper James said that Witherspoon’s following put pressure on the prior inventory management system. The company said that “a big part of delivering a great customer experience is ensuring that whatever Witherspoon is pictured wearing is available for purchase. And when a dress can sell out in mere minutes after she is photographed wearing it, ensuring supply matches demand is crucial.”
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