Suite Success

Sausalito, Calif.-based Serena & Lily has enjoyed rapid growth and success with its artistic, sophisticated higher-end home goods, including bedding, furniture and décor. “One of the most gratifying things about being part of this organization is that we’ve grown strongly despite the macro-economic trends,” says Jan Leigner, senior vice president of operations.

Textile designer and artist Serena Dugan and former software executive Lily Kanter launched the company in 2004 with the goal of providing fresh and style-driven children’s spaces. Since then, the company has ventured into most other rooms of the house, as well as gifts and accessories. Serena & Lily products are available through the company’s website and in specialty stores and national retailers across the United States, as well as in Canada and Puerto Rico.

While Serena & Lily’s growth has been heartening, its rapid pace — about 70 percent annually since its founding, Leigner says — taxed its previous information systems infrastructure.

The growing number of individuals from within various departments — shipping, accounting, customer service — that needed to access the application meant the system often slowed to a crawl. What’s more, any sales coming in via the web had to be manually re-created and entered into the company’s accounting system.

Also of concern was the fact that the server housing all of Serena & Lily’s data was located in the San Francisco Bay Area. That meant the company’s systems and data were vulnerable not only to power fluctuations, but seismic activity. “At the time, there were not a lot of safety nets,” Leigner says.

The safety of the cloud
To address these shortcomings, Serena & Lily installed integrated business software from NetSuite. Its applications are provided via software-as-a-service (SaaS) — what’s often referred to as the cloud — and can be accessed anywhere an Internet connection is available. Companies don’t need to add IT equipment, and Leigner is able to handle almost all new business initiatives with minimal IT resources.

Another benefit of NetSuite: It focuses on small to medium-sized businesses. From its start as “Quickbooks for the web,” NetSuite has expanded to provide basic financial reporting, warehouse and inventory management, as well as e-commerce and customer support capabilities. “We offer an end-to-end ability for merchants to use a single system for all their business needs,” says Baruch Goldwasser, director of sales and marketing for NetSuite.

That’s important, as the alternative can lead to slip-ups that alienate customers and increase costs. What’s more, many licensed software applications require a network between the stores and their headquarters to link the POS systems to the corporate financial network, marketing and customer support. “Each store needs to be integrated with each system, and it gets to be a real nightmare,” Goldwasser says.

Cloud-based software provides visibility across the enterprise — and that’s key, given the three challenges facing most retailers, Goldwasser says.

One is unifying the various processes, like order management, customer support and general ledger reporting. Another is unifying operations across channels, including physical stores, catalogs and online orders. The savviest retailers, for instance, offer services like online ordering with in-store pickup. All employees using this system are able to determine which products are available in each channel — in some cases, even in each store.

The last challenge is finding a way to use information gathered via social media. “Everyone wants to be on Facebook and tweet and request product reviews, but then they don’t know what to do with the information,” Goldwasser says.

NetSuite partners with third-party providers of applications focused on social media. One such provider, PowerReviews, lets customers review products and indicate what sort of user they are — say, a student, a homemaker or a new parent. The software then compiles this information so that retailers can more accurately target marketing campaigns.

When it comes to social media, Serena & Lily focuses mostly on Facebook and Twitter. It has run promotions through Facebook using promotional codes unique to the audience. The company uses Twitter primarily to reach others (like interior designers) in the industry, Leigner says.

Making the move
Given the clear need to move from its previous system, Serena & Lily decided to go live with NetSuite just eight weeks after the implementation consultant began working with the company. To get NetSuite up and running within the tight time frame, the consultant focused on learning the company’s business and helping Serena & Lily employees identify key fields and workflows. “Even though it was painful to make the cutover sooner, it was less painful than to drag it out,” Leigner says.

Managing the cutover was a process of balancing the need to quickly move from the old system against the risk of creating problems that might reflect poorly on the Serena & Lily brand or alienate customers. “I always want to spend as much time [as possible] preparing, but you can’t get lost in that,” Leigner says. Fortunately, at the time, most of the company’s business was done via its wholesale channels. While timeliness in addressing customers’ concerns and orders is always important, the time frame wasn’t as accelerated as it can be when working directly with consumers.

Approximately one year after the launch, it became clear that Serena & Lily’s web store, which still was a stand-alone operation, wasn’t working as well as it could. The company moved to a NetSuite web store; now all online traffic happens within NetSuite, making it easier to view performance statistics and manage orders. “As soon as someone submits an order, everyone that needs to know about it does,” Leigner says.

In several other ways, NetSuite allows Serena & Lily to appear bigger than the company actually is. For instance, it can accept payments via EDI; without this capability, some large retailers might think twice about partnering with Serena & Lily, Leigner says. “I can be a company of four or five people, but I can access the tools and function [just like] a much larger organization.”

“As a company, marketing and sales make the promises. In operations, we keep the promises,” Leigner says. “An integrated platform allows me to do that.