Mary & Grace Fine Children's Clothing, founded in 2014, sells traditional children's clothing ranging in infants’ sizes through pre-teen sizes. The clothing line is fully customisable and sold through home ‘trunk shows’ throughout the south eastern portion of the United States, as well as online internationally. Garments are made to order in a small workroom in Texas, and shipped to Mary & Grace in Greenville, SC where they are all prepared and packaged for shipment to the customer. The Mary & Grace team currently consists of one full time employee, four part time employees, and 28 sales representatives (called hostesses).
By 2018, business was booming and Kristin Watkins, owner of Mary and Grace, needed a system to streamline the operation. The main challenges solved by the App include customer order entry and tracking, order submission to the workroom for production purposes, sales tracking, inventory management, and customer payment processing.
Kristin found Knack online in the usual way and decided published her business requirements on Knack’s ‘Builder Network’. Ultimately agreeing with Kirkness Associates to proceed with the project.
“We produce over 10,000 children's garments per year and with the clothing line being fully customisable each and every garment is different from the next. The App has saved me hundreds of hours of manual data entry and completely eliminated the margin of error that comes along with manual data entry”.
Main Features of the App
Order Entry and Payment:
Each "hostess" (sales representative) has an account and enters customer orders directly into the system. Each customer also has an account and receives an email prompt to review her order. The system allows the customer to approve or deny the order, based upon accuracy. Upon approval, the customer can pay for her order through the payment processing screen.
Sales Reporting:
The app also includes sales reports by season and "hostess" (sales representative). The app stores all customer data including name, address, phone, email, and order history.
Styles/Fabrics/Inventory Management:
The app is setup to customise 100+ styles in 70+ fabrics and trims, which are setup each season. The app manages and tracks the inventory of the available fabrics and trims.
Production Submission: The app is also used to send the orders in the correct format to the workroom for production purposes. The app tracks each order from order entry, approval, payment, production status, and finally shipping status. The features in the app have significantly improved the efficiency of Mary & Grace, which frees up time to work on other aspects of the business and increasing profitability. The most recent additions to the app (payment processing and more specific fields for custom options) have saved me over 500 working hours per year in manual data entry. In addition, data entry errors have been completely eliminated with the new features added. This saves on material and labour charges for incorrect items made, and therefore, gets orders into the hands of customers more efficiently and accurately. “Kirkness Associates built this app from scratch for Mary & Grace and has continued to support and upgrade the app over each new season, as new requirements are made known, since the app was launched in June 2018. Kirkness Associates has been able to meet and exceed all expectations, providing user friendly solutions to improve efficiency in ways not even thought of by Mary & Grace. Julian is very detail oriented, highly responsive, trustworthy, and thinks outside of the box in order to quickly find unique solutions to complex issues. The level of support provided by Kirkness Associates and commitment to implementing solutions has been exceptional!” Kristin Watkins You can find out more about Knack here and if you’d like to discuss your own app requirements then please use our contact form here.
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