Coterie White Optimizes Bridal Sales with B2B Wave

The perfect wedding dress is a quest like no other. For brides-to-be worldwide, it’s much like the search for the Holy Grail: coveted and hard to track, but a pure treasure when they finally find it. No one understands this better than the team at Coterie White, a pioneering bridal sales agency.

Founded by Kimberly Marcoux and Christina Wettstein in 2018, Coterie White specializes in supporting small emerging bridal designers from around the world in entering the US market. To do so, the team leverages its extensive industry connections and over a decade of experience in bridal wholesale and retail to offer a unique platform to designers and retailers alike.

As the company rapidly grew, Coterie White embarked on a mission to modernize its operations, streamline processes, and scale its business. B2B Wave’s eCommerce platform allowed the team to do that and more, like cutting unnecessary costs, customizing its storefront to fit the intricacies of bridal dresses, and efficiently managing collaborating designers.

Challenge

At the outset, the team at Coterie White began its business journey steeped into manual work. With a goal to reach a turnover of $1 million within its first year and the company rapidly expanding, these processes soon became cumbersome and labor-intensive.

As their clientele expanded and the complexity of orders grew, relying solely on manual entry in spreadsheets and through QuickBooks became increasingly inefficient, time-consuming, and prone to errors. Also, the intrinsic specificities of bridal orders, like dress customization options available to customers that go beyond size and color and may elicit additional costs (e.g., adding a train, adjusting dress length), rush timeline and delivery calculations, and collecting deposits and charging balances, posed significant challenges to the team.

For Coterie White, existing solutions lacked the flexibility and depth needed to manage its unique business requirements. They forced the team to juggle multiple platforms and tasks simultaneously, impeding productivity and growth.

“The other solutions, we would always get to the end of it,” shares Christina Wettstein, Co-Founder and Director of Brand Strategies at Coterie White.

Solution

Coterie White’s quest for a flexible and comprehensive solution led them to B2B Wave’s B2B eCommerce platform. The team’s journey with B2B Wave began with a vision to streamline operations and enhance communication across their intricate supply chain, which spans multiple designers, retailers, sales reps, and admins. Soon,  B2B Wave proved to be a game-changer for their operations, smoothening their order management and communication, eliminating redundancies, and minimizing errors.

With multiple parties involved in order processing, a system that streamlined coordination was essential. One of the platform’s standout features is its “four-member plugin,” as Wettstein calls it, which enables seamless order processing from order initiation to shipment, connecting admin users, retailers, sales reps, and designers.

B2B Wave’s multi-user functionality transformed collaboration within the Coterie White team and their network of designers and retailers. The team used B2B Wave’s order status feature to implement a system that facilitated seamless communication and coordination, tackling cumbersome email chains or manual handovers. “The orders pass through all of this. It actually removes a ton of human error for that reason. So, we’re not entering orders more than once,” Wettstein states.

And here’s how it works: The team utilizes status updates to mark key milestones in the order lifecycle. For example, the “Ready for production” status “signals the designer that they have a new order ready to go,” Wettstein explains. Once ready, the designers use the “Reaching completion” status to inform customers that their order is about to be shipped. At the same time, this status informs the Coterie White team to claim the balance from retailers, ensuring that they stay on top of payments and standardizing cash flow within the business.

This streamlined workflow allows Coterie White to monitor orders smoothly through each stage. Importantly, it significantly reduces the likelihood of errors and delays and eliminates the need to hire staff exclusively for order processing and book balancing. “We’ve probably taken the work of two order processors plus accounts receivable and removed all of that. So, I have saved the company probably at least $200,000 a year by using B2B Wave”, Wettstein shares.

Moreover, B2B Wave’s robust analytics capabilities empower Coterie White with valuable insights into their operations, enabling informed decision-making and proactive management of production processes. From monitoring order statuses to assessing designer performance, the platform provides invaluable data to drive continuous improvement and optimize business outcomes.

“We’re able to manage more for production than ever before because we can see what’s going on. And the other cool thing is that each designer gets an end-of-month report. And so we can run a report on how much was shipped for the month. So, for example, if a designer shipped $68,000 for the month, but they had return authorizations requested, we can calculate the metric of failure or success for quality control as well,” Wettstein discloses.

At the end of the day, the Coterie White team can work smarter and focus on critical tasks.

Results

Adopting B2B Wave marked a turning point for Coterie White, ushering in a new era of efficiency and growth and yielding tangible results that exceeded the team’s expectations.

Within just two years of implementation, the company achieved a remarkable milestone of $5 million in revenue. Leveraging B2B Wave’s features, such as product options and order statuses, multi-user functionality, and its integration capabilities with QuickBooks Online, Coterie White was able to retool order processing workflows, foster better collaboration, and ultimately drive growth and profitability.

Looking ahead, Coterie White continues to explore avenues for optimization and innovation, recognizing B2B Wave as a cornerstone of their operational success. “I think with B2B Wave, there’s more we can do together,” Wettstein shares. With the platform’s unmatched flexibility and customization options, coupled with responsive support from the B2B Wave team, Coterie White remains poised to lead and innovate in the competitive bridal industry landscape, much like a bride walking confidently down the aisle in the dress of her dreams.

Take your wholesale business online with B2B Wave

Coterie White soared its business and profits with our powerful B2B eCommerce platform. Check out what B2B Wave can do for you, and request a demo with our expert team today.

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