CLOGAU.
Clogau turned to TIDE to integrate their new tech stack, and quickly.
The brand.
Clogau Gold of Wales Ltd: creators of beautiful gold jewellery since 1992, with all pieces containing gold from the St David’s Mine near Bontddu in North Wales.
Beginning with just 5 products, Clogau now sell 552 brochure pieces and over 38,000 variations of engagement rings!
Business is booming; in the last 5 years, Clogau has grown by 50%, driven largely by their Direct-to-Customer (DTC) sales channels. In that same time frame, 9 new Clogau stores have opened, and the website has doubled in traffic.
From brick-and-mortar, from online, and from cruise ships, Clogau jewellery is sold nationally and internationally, with an average of 20,000 orders per month from 41 locations.
Why TIDE?
Clogau’s previous Enterprise Resource Planner (ERP) was not meeting their business requirements, so they migrated to Unleashed.
With Unleashed, Clogau gained the following advantages:
- Visibility of the value and quantity of held stock.
- Greater control of their complex order management.
- Access to deeper, more granular reports and accounting.
But now they needed an integration solution that could work alongisde Unleashed, to automate multichannel order management in high volumes. Enter TIDE…
Unleashed introduced Clogau to TIDE as their partner for complex integrations. As well as the software, the team at TIDE is adept at:
- Consulting on and building multichannel integrations, including its automation.
- Understanding business processes in order to offer smart solutions and new features.
One Week
Between introductions and going live. Phew!
7%
Increase in sales since using TIDE and Unleashed (Q2 2023 – Q2 2024).
4,242
Orders over Black Friday weekend 2023, worth £500,000, all managed smoothly by TIDE.
15,957
Orders processed by TIDE over Christmas 2023, worth £2.3 million!
Requirements.
As an omnichannel business, Clogau was bound to have some tough requirements for their integration.
- Handle a high volume of orders at all times, with peak traffic at Christmas, Black Friday, and - of course - Valentine's Day.
- Coordinate complex product management to span from Shopify, to Unleashed, to Lightspeed Retail (formerly Vend), with Shopify as the source of truth.
- Retrieve orders from 15+ brick-and-mortar stores using Lightspeed Retail ePOS, and manage them independently in Unleashed.
- Retrieve orders from 3 Shopify sites, which include integrated orders from Amazon and eBay, as well as consignment orders from 20+ cruise ships. The source of all orders must be identified and categorised in Unleashed.
- Stock levels for each sales channel must be informed by its corresponding Unleashed warehouse.
Naturally, Clogau wanted to minimise downtime during the transition, and so were working to a tight deadline. TIDE was up to the challenge, and so the time between signing-up and going live with the first phase of the TIDE integration was just one week!
The TIDE solution.
Phase 1: The Foundation
The migration of Clogau to Unleashed and TIDE was achieved in two phases. The priority with Phase 1 was to get selling! Here’s what we accomplished together in one week:
- A high volume of orders are passed from multiple eCommerce channels into Unleashed, the inventory management solution and cornerstone of the new tech stack.
- Stock is kept in sync across 41 locations. The stock of each brick-and-mortar store is informed by its own corresponding warehouse in Unleashed, while the Shopify stores are each informed by a unique combination of warehouses. Despite this complexity, TIDE has met this requirement with only 4 data streams.
- Order status is automatically updated in Shopify and Lightspeed Retail when changes are made in Unleashed.
Phase 2: The Nitty-Gritty
Products
The core of Phase 2 was focused on the more unique requirements of Clogau, the most important being end-to-end product synchronicity.
Clogau manage 40,000 SKUs (and growing!), and also support the creation of unique jewellery by customers. A product’s life begins in Shopify, but Clogau needed product records to sync to every platform in their tech stack so that:
- Product details like price, weight, and barcode can be updated centrally, and only once.
- Buyers in Unleashed could raise purchase orders for new SKUs.
- Custom jewellery could be assembled to order.
- Detailed product reports can be generated in Lightspeed Retail
- Staff from all departments, who may have different access, have complete visibility of the product catalogue.
Order Management
The level of automation was expanded. Depending on the source of the order, such as Shopify, Amazon, JD Williams, etc, orders needed to be assigned to different warehouses and categories in Unleashed, to maintain accurate stock and sales reports. This was achieved with automation scripts in TIDE’s configuration. The scripts read an order’s data to find unique markers like tags, attributes, or the name of the integrated app that generated it, and used them to assign the order to its destination in Unleashed.
Back-in-Stock Dates
If a product is unavailable, then people will want to know when it will be back in stock! Clogau makes back-in-stock dates visible to their customers thanks to TIDE’s Purchase Order process. TIDE scans Unleashed for open purchase orders and gathers the expected delivery date, along with the purchased quantity of each item within it. It will then sync this information to metafields on each applicable product in Shopify. Customers are then able to see when a restocking is expected!
TIDE describes both the software and the people behind it. Combined, our clients are provided both robust features and broad experience in order to deliver a leading solution.
On top of that, TIDE works in partnership with clients like Clogau, listening to their needs and developing features to meet their evolving requirements. As you grow, so does TIDE.
The feedback.
Don’t just take our word for it. Here’s what Managing Director of Clogau, Ben Roberts, had to say:
“Our increasing success in the last few years saw our existing infrastructure struggling to keep up with the high volume of orders. Clogau chose TIDE to help us completely overhaul our workflows using a new tech stack, and we couldn’t be happier with our decision.
We’ve been able to cut out a huge amount of unnecessary work and channel hundreds of saved hours back into the business, as well as offer customers a more efficient service – it’s been a real win-win!”
The tech stack.
eCommerce Platform
Inventory Management
ePOS Platform
Marketplace
Marketplace
Read enough? Get started with TIDE now!
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