Brightpearl Spices Up Operations And Saves SEVEN Hires At Dan-O’s Seasoning

“Brightpearl has been instrumental in us becoming a successful $30M retail brand” – Sean Bowman, VP of Finance, Dan-O’s Seasoning

When Dan Oliver came up with the idea to launch his own brand of seasoning, people told him not to bother.

The seasoning and spices market was already saturated in the USA, with grocery store aisles practically overflowing with hundreds of different options.

But Dan didn’t listen.

He knew there was something special about the unique blend of herbs and spices he’d perfected while working as a bartender in Louisville, KY– and he was right.

In the early years of Dan-O’s Seasoning, he saw success from showcasing his product range – which has expanded to include a line up of eight seasoning blend varieties alongside the original all-purpose blend – at farmers markets and outdoor shows. It was particularly popular with hunters who used the different flavors to season their deer meat.

Then the pandemic hit – and the markets Dan relied on for his livelihood stopped overnight.

Inspired by entrepreneur influencer Gary Vaynerchuk’s advice to adopt TikTok as a brand marketing strategy, Oliver decided to give the platform a try.

Turning up the heat

With TikTok having gained 45 million users a month in the US alone, the timing was perfect – and Dan’s easy-to-follow recipe videos went viral, racking up millions of views which quickly translated into sales and pushed revenue to $10M.

But there was a problem. Dan-O Seasoning didn’t have the technology in place to cope with such rapid growth.

Sean Bownman, VP of Finance, says: “We had a revenue of $10M but we were a 100% manual business – that wasn’t sustainable.

“Our systems were very rudimentary; I knew that if we continued with a manual, spreadsheet-based approach we were going to fail.

“It didn’t make sense to keep hiring people to plug numbers into a spreadsheet. Our payroll costs were going to skyrocket – and it still wouldn’t be as accurate as an automated system.

“We also didn’t want a pricey legacy ERP like Netsuite. We needed a slick, flexible system that could connect seamlessly with our website, sales channels and QuickBooks and eliminate the manual work that was dragging us down.

“I kept coming across positive reviews for Brightpearl so I got a demo and a quote – and I was sold.”

As a leading retail operating system, Brightpearl is packed with built-for-retail features including market-leading inventory planning, a game-changing Automation Engine and a library of Plug & Play integrations which offers native, ‘out of the box’ connections to leading apps and tools, including Shopify, Amazon, and 3PL providers.

Thanks to a unique expert-led implementation strategy that includes full training and support, Brightpearl is typically set up in around 90 days – in stark contrast to traditional ERPs which take many months or even years to set up.

Dan-O’s Seasoning, which sells on Amazon and its own WooCommerce website as well as having partnerships with leading US retailers like Kroger and Walmart, was live on Brightpearl in just three months.

Recipe for success

With immediate access to powerful automation functionality, the retailer was quickly able to streamline its operations, saving time and resources.

With Brightpearl at the heart of its tech stack, Dan-O’s revenue has more than tripled.

Sean says: “It’s made my life so much easier, I can’t even tell you.

“I’ll always say wonderful things about Brightpearl, because I started as an entry-level accountant and now I’m the VP of finance and I owe a lot of that to the benefits that Brightpearl gave me.

“It consolidates revenue from all our sales channels into one daily update. We used to have to wait for cash to hit our bank account before we knew how much money we were really making; now I get updates in real time. And the data is completely reliable.

“Closing months used to take weeks by itself, now it can be done in a few days. We’re saving weeks every month across the board.

“Our shipping used to be reliant on a ton of manual data entry but now it’s completely automated. An order comes into Brightpearl from the seller platform and gets sent automatically to the 3PL that ships it. We don’t even have to touch it.”

Sean estimates that the automation of so many time-consuming manual tasks has saved the company hiring seven full-time employees, as well as dramatically reducing errors.

Visibility has been significantly improved and data-driven decision making has been enabled, which have helped the company scale so successfully.

The business has benefited from being able to connect in minutes to a huge library of leading tools and apps as it grows, including to Amazon, eBay, WooCommerce, QuickBooks and ShipStation, but it has also been able to get custom integrations built quickly and easily thanks to Brightpearl’s partner network.

A taste of triumph

“Brightpearl has been instrumental in us becoming a successful $30M retail brand,” Sean says.

“Previously, if a certain spice blend was doing well – or doing poorly – we didn’t have the data and analysis to quickly make top-level decisions. Now we do.

“We’ve been able to keep our team lean by automating, which has meant we have more money to invest in marketing and growth strategies.

“Now we can look to hire more – but we won’t be wasting talented people on tedious manual processes, we’ll be using them to help us scale.

“A business and a person is only as good as the tools it uses. You can have the best employees in the world but if they’re spending their time plugging in data, it doesn’t make sense. You need a tool like Brightpearl to help you along the way. – Sean Bowman, VP of Finance, Dan-O’s Seasoning.”

“One of the best things about Brightpearl is that you can connect to many leading tools and you can get custom integrations built easily too. We’ve done it several times and it’s been done in a matter of weeks and worked perfectly.

“It means we don’t have to worry about Brightpearl being able to cope with increased volumes as we grow – if we run into an issue, we can get an add-on built and it solves it.

“Brightpearl’s mantra is that it helps brands ‘grow fearlessly’ – and we can absolutely attest to that.

“We are growing fast and will be a $100M+ brand in no time – and we’re confident that, with Brightpearl’s help, we can get there.”