Happy Feet is a family-owned business selling high-quality specialty slippers.

Company Profile: Happy Feet began in a mall kiosk in 1995. After years of growth and success with traditional brick-and-mortar retail, the company started focusing on ecommerce in 2002.

Solution Partners: Amazon | Shopify | ShipStation

Market: International

Industry: Retail Apparel

SkuVault Core makes us work faster. It is a really good price point and is great for a company our size because it allows us to scale.

The Challenge

As a company selling a relatively narrow product line, their needs were pretty straightforward. They needed clear, simple inventory and warehouse management and solid reporting features.

In the past they paid for expensive software to manage inventory until they realized that while those softwares worked great and got the job done, they also featured advanced capabilities that weren’t really necessary for a smaller business, but which they still had to pay for.

As a smaller company, they also needed a WMS platform that could scale with them as they grew and innovated their product line and their footprint. Their big challenge was finding a way to manage various sales channels as well as manage their marketplaces in the US, UK and Europe, and do it efficiently with a small staff.

The Solution

After years of paying a high price for advanced software more geared towards larger companies, Pat Yates, president and owner, realized that SkuVault Core can do everything they needed, at a much lower cost with a straightforward, user-based pricing model. “We didn’t need some rich, over-complicated and costly solution. We just needed to know where our inventory is between channels and have solid reporting,” Yates said.

SkuVault Core’s easy-to-use system with simple features and clear reporting has allowed the team at Happy Feet to work smarter and fulfill faster across the various sales channels and marketplaces. When they built their online store in Shopify, they easily integrated with SkuVault Core, and are now able to rely on it being a consistent and accurate place to manage all their inventory.

They have enjoyed the flexibility of the system and the ease-of-use. “SkuVault Core has helped us scale because it’s so user-friendly. It has been a perfect fit for us because it is customizable and has allowed us to scale with it,” he said.

The other big advantage is the client support. As Yates put it, “Anytime we’ve had an issue or needed a custom solution, we reach out and there is immediate action and a resolution.” This level of hands-on support has proven very important to businesses of this size whose livelihood depends on being able to sell online efficiently.

The Results

SkuVault Core has empowered the team at Happy Feet to cut down on fulfillment time because of how the inventory feed checks locations for available inventory and feeds right into the drop-shipping. This streamlined process ensures that the order is always correct and can be easily checked against the inventory.

They have also found that they are now able to innovate. Last year, when they rolled out their new line of Zlippers, they found that the kitting feature offered by SkuVault Core was integral to the success of this product, and was already included in their pricing.

Pat enjoys helping other entrepreneurs with their own business efforts. His biggest piece of advice for anyone selling online is to use the appropriate system that supports your business plan.“Make sure that it can report back the data you need to see in order to keep you from doing a ton of manual reporting work that would otherwise cost you a lot of time and money.”