Wrigleyville Sports

The Results
From Kosuke Fukudome's breakout first half to Geovany Soto's Rookie of the Year push in the second half, Wrigleyville Sports has been catering to Chicago Cubs fans' voracious appetite for merchandise and collectibles with the help of NetSuite.

The success of the baseball team has brought fans to the store and site to show their support, and daily order volumes have as much as quadrupled on a year-over-year basis. The mounting order volume has been smoothly handled by the NetSuite solution. "We don't have a huge staff of people who can diagnose technical issues, so NetSuite's reliability has been a plus," says Dave Weiss, Internet marketing manager at Wrigleyville Sports. "We enjoy having a hosted solution so that we do not have to buy and implement software upgrades, and the Internet-based solution has been responsive and reliable for our point-of-sale systems as well."

Wrigleyville Sports is now able to better target its marketing efforts with instant, real-time campaign tracking. "Instead of just knowing on an intuitive basis how our promotions are doing, I can see exactly what goes out the door because of an e-mail campaign," says Trey Carlstrom, co-owner of Wrigleyville Sports. "Thirty seconds after I send the campaign the orders start, and I can see if they bought what we promoted in the campaign, or chose to click through and buy something else."

NetSuite allows the company to make better use of its personnel. "Now that our order, inventory, and UPS shipping processes are so well-integrated and automated, we have been able to take five people off of manual order processing and put them on the phones, assisting customers," says Carlstrom. "Order processing now is as simple as the click of a button." Shipping has also become more cost-effective, as the company's old system did not support shipping from multiple locations. Now, Wrigleyville Sports can prepare items for shipment from all of the company's warehouse and store locations, both in Chicago and in Pittsburgh.

Challenges
Wrigleyville Sports has been serving Cubs fans since opening its first location across from Wrigley Field in 1990. Since then, the company has been riding the highs and lows of baseball on Chicago's North Side. As the company grew to include a dedicated warehouse, a satellite department store location in Chicago's downtown, and a Pittsburgh branch catering to the local Pirates, the limitations of its business software began to show.

"On the fulfillment side, we needed something smoother. All of our orders had to be billed manually and we had no integration with our shipping carriers," Carlstrom says. The company had to keep five people working on billing and shipping processes all day just to keep up with order volume. And with inventory updates syncing between locations only a few times per day, it was possible to make an embarrassing error such as committing to sell an item to a Web customer, then selling the same item again to a walk-in customer. Wrigleyville Sports wanted a real-time, multi-site environment to manage its operations, but wanted to avoid the expense of hiring full-time IT professionals to design and maintain such a system.

The Solution
2007 brought a new manager to Cubdom, and a new software platform to Wrigleyville Sports—NetSuite. "NetSuite was the fresh, updated product we were looking for to run our business," Carlstrom says. Integrated with OnSite for point-of-sale functionality, NetSuite quickly became a five-tool contributor to the company's lineup.

"Some of the other solutions we looked at were actually best-of-breed products which integrated several different packages. We were looking for the all-in-one approach NetSuite offers," Weiss says. "And NetSuite was ready to go for us very quickly, offering templates for our Web presence that were pleasing to the eye, easy to customize, and had all of the functionality we needed."

Soon, the company plans to use NetSuite's SuiteTalk Web services integration to sell through eBay, Amazon, and other popular marketplaces without introducing additional IT overhead. NetSuite will help Wrigleyville Sports expand its business, without requiring the company to hire more staff or to chain managers to their desks. "One of the most powerful things about NetSuite is that I don't have to be tied to the office in order to work," Weiss says. "Because of the Web-based interface, I can be just as productive in my home office."