Footwear Brand Trades QuickBooks and Fishbowl for NetSuite’s Seamless Shopify Connection and Powerful Data Warehouse

Mike Stiles, NetSuite Contributor

July 11, 2023


QUICK READ:

  • Feetures is a family-run footwear retailer with wholesale and D2C ecommerce channels.
  • Running the business with QuickBooks and Fishbowl required excessive manual work.
  • Feetures found the perfect fit in NetSuite, seeing wins like an 85% faster month-end close.
  • NetSuite Connector links the company’s ERP with Shopify for insights that fuel sales strategy.
  • Feetures consolidates NetSuite, Shopify, and Google Analytics data in NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, which produces visualizations that will drive more precise cash flow forecasts and optimal warehouse staffing.


About Feetures

Feetures is a family business. While working in the footwear industry at a hosiery brand, Hugh Gaither recognized that an elite performance sock with targeted compression, anatomical design, and features for both comfort and performance was missing from the market. So, he and his two sons founded Feetures in 2002.

Feetures has 1,000 SKUs, 55 employees, and $45 million in annual revenue. Operations are largely based in the Gaithers’ home state of North Carolina: Soon after its founding, Feetures established a design center in Charlotte, where it now runs marketing and product planning. Nine years ago, the company transitioned from its original distribution facility in Conover to a larger one in Hickory. Now, it has exceeded capacity at that facility and is developing a new warehouse.

Feetures works with multiple factories, three in Asia and two in the United States. It sells through a variety of channels:

  • Direct-to-consumer ecommerce on its own site and Amazon
  • Wholesale to large retailers like Dick's Sporting Goods, Academy Sports + Outdoors, Nordstrom, and REI
  • Wholesale via a site called Elastic that generates orders from specialty retailers in segments like running, hiking, golf, and tennis


Segmented Solutions Prevent Accuracy

Feetures previously used QuickBooks to manage financials and Fishbowl for warehouse management. The systems didn’t integrate well, which hindered operations, said Dan Roath, IT manager.

“The two systems were segmented to the extent that we were manually moving information from Fishbowl into QuickBooks. It took a lot of work to try and tie those systems together to ensure inventory accuracy and that our financial and sales information was flowing through appropriately.”


Feetures needed a business management system to tie all of its functions together. It carefully researched ERP systems and landed on NetSuite ERP(opens in new tab), which had powerful core capabilities plus modules that Feetures could add on as the company grew. The team started with core accounting and financials plus NetSuite Inventory Management, Demand Planning, Procurement, and CRM — and has added modules since.


NetSuite as the Perfect Fit

Feetures worked with the NetSuite team to implement its new system, taking advantage of the NetSuite SuiteSuccess(opens in new tab) implementation method to get up and running quickly with KPIs, workflows, reports, and dashboards. In terms of go-live, the switch was remarkably smooth, said Roath.

“We stopped using Fishbowl and started running on NetSuite over a single weekend. It was a seamless transition without any downtime or latency.”


Feetures appreciates the degree to which NetSuite is customizable. The team tapped into NetSuite’s network of partners(opens in new tab): Protelo, a NetSuite Solution Provider, developed custom EDI capabilities, along with additional dashboards and reporting tools. NetScore Technologies, another partner, added some ecommerce customizations.
 

Time-Savings Span Departments

Reporting: Feetures has used NetSuite to save countless hours previously spent manually validating its fragmented inventory, sales, and financial data. The team can trust the accuracy of data in NetSuite and instead spend time analyzing reports and gleaning insight into customer and order trends.

Finance and Inventory Management: In the finance department, the team no longer constantly contacts the warehouse team to understand why inventory adjustments were or weren’t made, instead referring to updates in NetSuite Inventory Management(opens in new tab). As a result, the team can calculate ending inventory, or the value of sellable inventory left at the end of the year, with less than 0.5% error, Roath said. And while it previously took almost an entire month, the month-end close now takes no more than five days.

Ecommerce: Feetures syncs its ERP environment with its Shopify storefront using NetSuite Connector. The automatic data transfer makes it easy for the team to experiment with listing both single SKUs and SKU bundles on Shopify, then track trends like which colors of its Elite Cushion women’s socks, for example, are popular when bundled. NetSuite Connector(opens in new tab) automatically sends orders to the warehouse, which operates using RF-Smart integrated with NetSuite. NetSuite Connector also automatically reflects any changes to Shopify product listings in NetSuite.

CRM: Feetures’ outside sales reps track customer interactions in NetSuite CRM(opens in new tab). With this centralized, detailed data on customer preferences and transactions, leadership can use NetSuite reporting(opens in new tab) to spot growth patterns in its individual ecommerce and wholesale channels, a capability it didn’t have before.
 

A Data Warehouse Ties It All Together

After its initial ERP implementation, Feetures kept an eye on development of NetSuite Analytics Warehouse as presented at each year’s SuiteWorld(opens in new tab) conference. With Feetures growing as it was, leaders wanted a single place to consolidate data from their NetSuite instance and other sources, then dig in and pull ever more useful reports. They briefly considered Microsoft Power BI and Tableau, but those solutions would’ve required hiring third-party consultants to integrate with NetSuite. NetSuite Analytics Warehouse(opens in new tab), however, offered seamless integration and the kind of varied analytics that Feetures wanted, Roath said.

“Data is critical to our business, so we wanted a data warehouse that could deliver insights into not just financials but also into sales, product, inventory, shipping, and more. NetSuite Analytics Warehouse was the right path.”


Feetures uses NetSuite Analytics Warehouse to sync data from NetSuite, Shopify, and Google Analytics. It also pulls in a few remaining CSV uploads and has loaded in legacy data from 2019 to take advantage of lookback analysis and tease out long-term trends.

The team appreciates how quickly the solution refreshes data and delivers visualizations: “We're not sitting waiting for that spinning icon to load all the information,” Roath said. “It’s impressively fast.”
 

Positioned for More Growth

Feetures has big plans with NetSuite for the coming years. Feetures leadership has customized role-based NetSuite dashboards(opens in new tab) for each department head. The finance team will continue this effort, developing dashboards that display the cash flow KPIs that are particularly important to the company’s growth at any given time.

The team is also building out a data set that will allow it to use the machine learning capabilities in NetSuite Analytics Warehouse to create more accurate 12-month cash flow forecasts. It also plans to use the solution to forecast fulfillment demands: For example, maybe Feetures fulfills 100 orders on the average Friday but tends to see an uptick on Mondays. The team will analyze legacy data in NetSuite and map those trends so it can staff its warehouse accordingly.

Feetures is also evaluating the NetSuite Planning and Budgeting(opens in new tab) module, recognizing that the value of the suite increases as the team brings more functions into it. As a NetSuite administrator, Roath especially appreciates how NetSuite makes his job easier: Role-level access(opens in new tab) ensures that employees only see the information relevant to their jobs, and system logs easily reveal employee activity for added security. From an application management standpoint, NetSuite makes it easy to get things running smoothly again in the case of scripts or workflows not triggering exactly right, he said.

He added that NetSuite is the system Feetures will grow on — with no end in sight.

“Whether we add a capability in NetSuite or a solution that integrates with NetSuite, it's very easy to get the functionality we need as long as we maintain a central hub of data. For us, that hub is always going to be NetSuite.”

NetSuite has packaged the experience gained from tens of thousands of worldwide deployments over two decades into a set of leading practices that pave a clear path to success and are proven to deliver rapid business value. With NetSuite, you go live in a predictable timeframe — smart, stepped implementations begin with sales and span the entire customer lifecycle, so there's continuity from sales to services to support.