Introduction

Glenbrae have been making high quality knitwear for over 100 years. Based in West Yorkshire, they use only the finest Merino and Lambswool to produce premium quality sportswear. Their clothing range includes golf sweaters, polo shirts, waterproof trousers and t-shirts, all of which are available in a variety of colours and designs, and which are customisable with embroidered logos and monogramming.

Glenbrae approached Priocept to assist them with the analysis, design and implementation of a new e-commerce platform that would drive future growth and improve the efficiency of internal business processes.

E-Commerce Requirements

As a long-established business, Glenbrae had developed various offline systems for managing their business that included taking orders over the phone, writing these down on paper-based order slips, and later re-keying this information into spreadsheets. In other words, their business was in desperate need of digital transformation in order to build an automated, integrated, and efficient platform that was capable of managing the complete business, from online purchases through to inventory management and
accounting.

Glenbrae had previously experimented with e-commerce including a modest online store, but their core interest was in selling customised products directly to wholesale customers. They were therefore
seeking a system that would allow them to improve the user experience for retail customers (B2C), whilst also enabling the complex user journeys required to satisfy wholesalers (B2B).

When we first envisaged this project, we were mainly looking to be able to sell directly to our wholesale customers through the online store. But as our requirements developed, we realised that what we needed was a more fundamental transformation of the way that we do business.

Danielle Brown (CEO, Glenbrae)

Glenbrae asked Priocept to design a solution capable of meeting all of their requirements and after a comprehensive review of candidate software products available in the market, BigCommerce was selected to be at the core of the solution due to its B2B capabilities and its extensive APIs that allow complex integrations with external systems.

The core elements of the solution are as follows:

• BigCommerce – For inventory management and to deliver the online store that serves B2B and B2C customers.
• BundleB2B – To enable advanced B2B capabilities such as assigning sales agents responsibility for particular customer accounts, allowing sales agents to masquerade as the accounts they manage in order to place orders on the customer’s behalf, and enabling payment-on-account options in the checkout process.
• QuickBooks Online – For managing the accounting side of the business and reconciling offline payments.
• Google BigQuery – For aggregating data from BigCommerce.
• Google Data Studio – For implementation of custom reports based on BigQuery data.
• Google Cloud Functions – To provide event-driven integration between systems, allowing data updates based on schedules or when triggered by BigCommerce web hooks.

Results

The selection of BigCommerce, combined with integration work by Priocept, made it possible to rapidly deliver an all-new e-commerce platform, with minimal custom development effort and limited ongoing maintenance costs.

We understood our requirements went beyond the capabilities of any individual product and recognised the need to and a set of complimentary systems that we could integrate, with custom development used to knit everything together seamlessly. BigCommerce enabled that flexibility. With its open API and existing apps – that we could use straight out-of-the-box – we have been able to develop a system capable of running our entire business whilst keeping custom development, and therefore development and maintenance costs, to a minimum.

Danielle Brown (CEO, Glenbrae)