The Canadian women’s fashion retailer realizes a 25% increase in sales after implementing new technology for managing orders across channels.

As of today, Laura Canada, the popular Canadian women’s fashion retailer, has more than 150 stores across the country and a large e-commerce presence. But several years ago, the company had a very small team that was hampered by rigid technology, processes and a lack of flexibility over the order lifecycle.

Subsequently, Marco Nobert, was hired as vice president of customer relationship management, digital marketing and e-commerce to reinvigorate the company’s commerce approach, with a focus on delivering a seamless end-to-end experience for customers. 

Laura Canada wanted an omnichannel operation that was efficient and offered a smooth customer experience both online and off. To do so, Marco and his team set out in search of technology partners that would help the company meet this challenge, and offer the flexibility needed to grow over time.

After some vetting of vendors, Laura Canada selected Kibo Commerce to create an order management system for both distribution centers and in-store shipping. In adopting Kibo’s technology, the retailer was able to dramatically increase sales and revive its commerce.

Laura Canada tends to have low-depth inventory, which means that a single store or distribution center doesn’t have a large amount of inventory across available sizes and styles. What’s more, the retailer was having to operate without a fully resourced e-commerce team. In order to support online and in-store customers across Canada, it needed to be able to configure shipping and fulfillment options that would quickly and easily get the right item to the right customer, no matter where they were.

A careful search resulted in the selection of Kibo as the company’s order management system. Marco’s team worked with Kibo representatives to quickly enable ship-from-store after bringing the technology on board. He was then able to train store associates to use Kibo and ship goods in a timely manner: if an order wasn’t fulfilled within 48 hours, store managers would get a report for a pending order.

In addition to upgrading technologies in its stack, the retailer made a number of strategic changes to create added flexibility and efficiency. It began shooting creative material for products in-house, so that adding new products to its site took less time. It also hired copywriters and other staff that would be able to support e-commerce operations more effectively. With new and readily available assets, and Kibo integrated into the stack, Laura Canada had what it needed to scale e-commerce significantly. 

The new process quickly enabled Laura Canada to increase sales by 25%. “Kibo offered the modern, flexible order management technology we needed to sell inventory across all of our stores and distribution centers until we didn’t have any inventory left,” says Nobert.

“Kibo is flexible enough to make different business decisions,” he continues. “It’s also easy to use and to implement, in the sense that we don’t have to wait for any backend coding. Typically, we are in discussion with the Kibo team regularly, and can quickly adjust fulfillment rules within the same day of the request.”

These changes led to a dramatic 400% increase in online sales in the three years after changes were implemented at the company.