Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 E-Commerce Growth Hacking podcast, hosted by Caroline Baldwin, gets under the hood of highly successful e-commerce brands to discover the key technologies they are using to power growth.
In series 1, episode 6, we caught up with Furniturebox, an online furniture retailer based in South West UK with a reputation for speedy delivery and great customer service. After launching in 2016, the brand initially sold via online marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay, before additionally operating via its own Magento 2 website from 2019.
During the podcast, the brand’s Head of E-Commerce, James Ewens, who shared tons of unmissable insight into how the brand achieved 267% growth during 2019/20, ranking them ‘Fastest-Growing Business in the South West’ in the Brightpearl Lightning 50, and 16th place overall. He also revealed how the business plans to maintain these high levels of growth, and how the brand puts tech first in everything they do.
Here are some of the highlights from the transcript…
- “We tend to describe ourselves as a tech company that sells furniture online – because everything we’ve done has been about using tech to further our growth. As this is different to a traditional furniture company who may have started out selling in showrooms, it’s likely this ‘tech first’ mindset that has given us the edge over the competition.”
- “Brightpearl is the foundation of our tech stack and powers everything we do – without it we’d have no order management system, no inventory management, no purchase order management – but we’ve also brought on a lot of other tech to bolster what Brightpearl does for us.”
- “We use Inventory Planner for demand planning and stock forecasting, that’s been an enormous boom for us. During Covid, when demand was fluctuating manically – when stores were open, then closed, then open – Inventory Planner was our key tool. Without it we would have really struggled.”
- “When we doubled the product range we realised we needed a smarter way to store product info, so we invested in Pimberly which again has been another key partner. So Brightpearl, Inventory Planner and Pimberly are really the three tech tools that have made us a success story.”
- “Tech is the answer – never be afraid to invest in tech. Your tech stack drives everything you do – efficiency gain, product launch gain, turnover gain. We’re in a world where tech is so important, so my top tip for growth is never be afraid to invest in it.”
Want to hear more of what James had to say? Catch up with the full episode, and subscribe to upcoming ones, here.
