Name: Paul Long, President
Business: ANIÁN
Year founded: 2014
Based in: Victoria, Canada
Solutions: inventory management, order management, Shopify Shipping
Founded on the belief that clothing production shouldn’t negatively impact the world we live in, ANIÁN uses recycled natural fiber textiles from landfills to create timeless, lifelong clothing. Based in Canada, ANIÁN is on a mission to change the fast-consumption fashion industry, providing clothing that people can enjoy and feel good about.
ANIÁN has two flagship retail locations in Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia, a presence in more than 150 other retail stores across Canada and the United States, as well as an online store. With a thriving business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) business model, the company, needed a way to simplify its supply chain operations. That’s when the company turned to Shopify.
ANIÁN started using Shopify in 2014 and has scaled its B2B and B2C operations, thanks to capabilities that enable the brand to:
- Manage and track incoming and outgoing inventory
- Integrate with its shipping carrier of choice
- Visualize data through advanced reporting capabilities
Challenge
As a circular fashion company that gives new life to textiles, ANIÁN sources a variety of materials that can be used to produce its high-end clothing. “We manufacture all of our own clothing,” says Paul Long, president of ANIÁN, “We design the materials and work with the mills. All of our clothing is made out of post-consumer waste … with no dyes.”
Once manufactured, ANIÁN has to track and stock its inventory accordingly. But with numerous selling channels—wholesale, retail, and online—there’s a lot of management that goes on behind the scenes to get the clothing from the manufacturer to the warehouse, and into customers’ hands. ANIÁN not only needed a way to stay organized in the warehouse, but also a method for effectively managing and tracking shipments. With an average of 1, 100 weekly orders across Canada and the United States, ANIÁN needed a reliable way to manage sales and work with a shipping carrier that would meet customer delivery expectations. "The biggest attraction to Shopify was its inventory management capabilities—it’s a smooth way for us to manage inventory through multiple channels"—Paul Long, President, ANIAN.
The biggest attraction to Shopify was its inventory management capabilities—it’s a smooth way for us to manage inventory through multiple channels.
Solution
To help streamline processes from the time clothing enters the warehouse through to delivery, ANIÁN turned to Shopify.
ANIÁN has a centralized warehouse location to store and manage inventory. Once products are manufactured, ANIÁN uses inventory transfers in Shopify to track and import all its inventory data. ANIÁN manages approximately 10,000 variants at a time using Shopify, tracking all of the product details, including harmonized system codes, weight, and country of origin.
“Our supply chain is quite complex, but once everything hits our warehouse, it is logged by Shopify,” says Paul. “Having all of the product details in the platform and up to date is super helpful, because when you ship a product across the border, you sometimes need to pull up all of that information. They need to trace that good all the way back to exactly where we made it. Shopify allows us to do all of that.”
As products are sold, Shopify automatically deducts the inventory quantity, ensuring inventory numbers are always up to date.
ANIÁN also uses inventory transfers to manage outgoing inventory to its flagship retail stores and wholesale B2B customers, consisting of high-end tourism shops and over 150 retail locations across North America. They even use inventory tags to identify the B2B customer that inventory is meant for. Once the outgoing inventory is received, the recipient double checks that the quantities are accurate. With Shopify, ANIÁN has a complete history of inventory movement across their supply chain.
“Having one system to track all outgoing inventory makes it easy to see where inventory moves across our supply chain,” says Paul. “We even use Shopify’s inventory management in a creative way, where we’ll use transfers to identify inventory being used for a photo shoot or a tradeshow … meaning customers can’t purchase it, but it’s still tracked.”
Having one system to track all outgoing inventory makes it easy to see where inventory moves across our supply chain
Results
With the ability to track inventory from the manufacturer all the way to wholesale, retail, or online store customers, ANIÁN has an up-to-date view of inventory quantities at all times. From there, getting orders out the door for shipment is a breeze, thanks to Shopify’s integration with FedEx and the company’s scheduled pickups. All of the necessary product information, such as product weight, code, and country of origin is recorded in Shopify, ensuring FedEx has all the information it needs to ship their products cross-border.
What’s more, Shopify enables ANIÁN to truly understand the numbers. The company can keep track of inventory cost, pull numbers required for accounting, and have full visibility into their business performance at all times.
"Shopify is more visual, and our team is all visual. We really don’t like seeing tons and tons of digital data sitting in spreadsheets, because it’s just not how our brains work. We do really enjoy that interface. Reporting visualization and inventory management was one of the original reasons that we went over to Shopify. I love the visualization and reports—the amount of data we can pull is awesome.”—Paul Long, President, ANIÁN
Reporting visualization and inventory management was one of the original reasons that we went over to Shopify.
With Shopify, ANIÁN’s processes are more organized and streamlined, since everything is managed from one central location. From starting with the platform in 2014, to its scaled operations today, the future is bright for this environmentally conscious fashion brand.
