QUBS Builds a Foundation for Global Growth with Brightpearl  

Many of the best retail brands start with a truly brilliant product, and Norwegian toy brand QUBS is one of them.  

Its flagship toy, Qubitunes, is a wooden gaming device with patented tech inside designed to reinvent playtime by inspiring kids to create their own audio experiences.  

Qubitunes quickly picked up the coveted Toy Award in the Startup category at the Nuremberg Toy Fair and has also won the prestigious Red Dot Design Award and a Gold Mom’s Choice and a NAPPA Award in the US. 

But while its hero product was winning awards, the behind-the-scenes setup at QUBS certainly wasn’t.  

The team of 12 people spread across six European cities was running inventory on Excel spreadsheets and managing orders and invoices by email, with stock held by a single third-party warehouse in Switzerland.  

The brand had a roadmap to expand into the US, add Amazon marketplaces and open new warehouses, but the manual setup it relied on couldn’t support that kind of growth.  

Something had to change at the core of the business first. That’s where Brightpearl by Sage came in. 

Anders Landergren, COO at QUBS, says:

“We needed something scalable that integrated easily with Shopify and Amazon, and that we could grow into over time. Brightpearl looked a little bigger than we needed at that stage, but that was the point.”  

“After a few calls with the team, I felt confident it ticked all of the boxes and was the right solution for us.”

Swapping spreadsheets for scale  

Brightpearl is an advanced retail operating system built for retailers that have outgrown manual workarounds. It brings orders, inventory, warehouse management, fulfillment, analytics and accounting into one connected system, and it’s designed to support retailers as they expand into new channels and markets.  

With a library of flexible integrations Brightpearl fits the way retail brands work and can connect with your existing systems or new tools as your business grows. Backed by expert support, Brightpearl enables retailers to optimize and evolve their setup over time. 

For QUBS, the switch to Brightpearl changed the day to day almost immediately. The team went from spreadsheets that arrived from the Swiss warehouse on an ad hoc basis to a live view of stock at any moment.  

Order management, which had run on email and manual invoices, now sat in one place. 

Purchasing has changed too. Instead of emailing the factory in China to place an order, the team raises purchase orders directly in Brightpearl with cost prices already defined against each product. For Anders, that brought a level of transparency the old setup never had.

Anders says:

“Bringing in Brightpearl absolutely helped us to grow to the next level.” 

“We came from a world of doing everything manually with spreadsheets to having an intelligent platform that takes away lots of strain. To be able to do everything and see everything in one system was a complete game changer.”

 

Room to grow (without growing the team) 

With the basics under control, QUBS could start working through its expansion plans with Brightpearl.  

The brand added warehouses in the Netherlands and the US, connected Amazon in the UK, US and Germany, and kept its Shopify and B2B sales running within the same system. It gave the team, which works remotely across multiple cities, complete control and visibility for the first time.  

Anders is clear that the brand’s successful growth and its move to Brightpearl are linked. Brightpearl gave the business the headroom to take on more channels and locations without taking on more people to manage them. 

In fact, Anders estimates that using Brightpearl has saved the business at least two full-time hires, equating to a rough savings of 120K EUR every year.   

He says: “We would never have been able to expand into two warehouses and all the channels we have now if we’d carried on the old way.” 

“We’d have needed two or more people just to manage it all manually.” 

 

Every market and every channel in one place  

One of the smarter parts of the Brightpearl setup at QUBS is how it manages stock for different markets.   

Rather than ordering separate versions of each product for each country, the team imports plain, generic boxes from the factory in China and holds them in the Netherlands warehouse. 

The boxes are then sleeved and kitted by language only when they’re needed, with the German, Norwegian, English or Spanish packaging and the right safety leaflets and instructions added in the warehouse. It’s a just-in-time approach that keeps the business from tying up cash in market specific stock that might not sell. 

The model only works with a clear view of what’s in stock and what needs kitting next, which is where Brightpearl really comes into its own. Brightpearl tracks the pool of generic boxes and the kitted stock for each language separately, so the team can immediately see what’s selling and when a language version is running low, then ask the warehouse to kit more before it runs out. 

Anders says: “Now if I have a thousand plain boxes in the warehouse, I only hold a hundred in each language and kit more as we need them.”  

“This approach keeps us lean and stops us tying up cash in stock we might not sell, and thanks to Brightpearl it’s easy to set up and manage.” 

Just getting started 

As the business grows, Brightpearl will grow with it. There’s a lot more Anders and his team can grow into, from automation rules that cut out repetitive work, to clearer reporting and demand forecasting that supports healthy cash flow through Inventory Planner.    

That kind of headroom makes all the difference for a company with ambition like QUBS. With a CFO recently joining, the team is now focused on sharpening its financial reporting and getting more from the data in the system as growth continues to climb.  

Anders says: “Brightpearl has given us room to grow, and we’ve only scratched the surface of what it can do. As we scale, we’ll keep getting more out of it.”  

“We have recently added Retail Analytics to Brightpearl, helping us with more effective dashboard type reporting instead of the typical excel based reports you normally get out of an ERP.  Additionally, all team members are now equipped with Claude, making quick look ups on key performance data even more effective. We are still at an early-stage exploring what these added tools on top of Brighpearl will give us, but so far, it’s very promising.”  

“I’ve been really impressed with where it’s taken us so far, and I’m excited about where it can take us next.”  

Find out how Brightpearl can help your business grow fearlessly with a free demo.