Graff City, a graffiti and spray paint supplier based in Wales was founded in 2012. Over the last decade, the business has grown from its humble bedroom beginnings into a multi-million-pound business.

The company offers amateur and professional artists an ever-growing variety of art tools and clothing including spray cans, markers and art supplies. Since launching, they’ve expanded their product selection, built a community of artists and grown sales by offering competitive prices and great service. 

Their fuel for growth has been by pairing great service with an extensive range of art tools (240,000 spray cans in stock alone). This has led to top customer ratings and increased demand for products year-over-year. Now Graff City now looks to grow their product variety while scaling globally.

Challenges: Manual spreadsheet tasks led to overstocking and overselling

As customer demand increased and product lines grew, the Graff City team found that manually managing their inventory was causing overstocking and underselling.

Prior to joining Linnworks, Graff City had a few pain points caused by needing an inventory management or stock forecasting solution. The team managed their inventory manually, working from multiple spreadsheets to calculate stock sold, stock levels and stock that needed to be re-ordered on a weekly basis, which was time-consuming for the team. This also led to either over-ordering or under-ordering due to a lack of visibility all in one place.

Graff City was using a mixture of spreadsheets to create sales forecasts, mixed with managing orders in a separate solution, Despatch Cloud, which could not support their inventory management or stock forecasting requirements as they scaled.

Manually predicting demand can be time-consuming and error-prone for ecommerce businesses. Not having the right stock at the right time has both an effect on the bottom line and on customers.

“We were either holding on to too much stock, the wrong stock or not having the right products available because we didn’t have the stock – meaning customers could have gone elsewhere.” – Graff City.

Solution: Using Linnworks stock forecasting to replace manual processes and make data-driven decisions

Graff City turned to Linnworks to cut down the number of hours spent trying to get a clear understanding of their inventory. This included better visibility into future orders, current stock levels and inventory needs for a successful sales month.

By moving to Linnworks nearly a year ago, the Graff City team saved 8 hours per week automating manual and error-prone tasks.

Graff City highlighted the Linnworks stock forecasting functionality as a key benefit. Stock forecasting predicts the inventory levels needed to meet demand by using historical data from past orders and factors such as seasonality and demand trends to provide a simple, actionable perspective. 

“Because of stock forecasting, we’re no longer holding on to too much or the wrong stock, or not selling enough of the right stuff because it’s out of stock. The insight is valuable to the whole business…What used to be a lengthy process taking the majority of 1 day per week can now be done within 30 minutes, this not only saves me a lot of time but also provides me with more accurate re-ordering figures”

Since joining Linnworks and using Stock forecasting, Graff City are able to forecast sales, lead time and desired stock cover days to see exactly when they need to order extra inventory for a huge range of products.  “Stock forecasting allows us to plan ahead and identify patterns and trends on a monthly basis. It helps us with the ordering process, instead of manually going through all of our items to see what’s sold, what’s popular and what we need more of for an upcoming period.” – Graff City.

Results

The results are no more overstocking, underselling or holding onto stock for too long. Linnworks Stock forecasting ensures that Graff City knows exactly how much inventory they need, and when they need it to meet customer demand.

Looking Ahead

Going forward, Graff City look to working closer with other leading art and graffiti manufactures, while maintaining their best in our class service and customer experience by having the right stock on hand at the right time.

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