How NetSuite empowers apparel, footwear and accessories growth

• Keeping up with constant change
• Roadblocks to overcome
• Here’s the solution: NetSuite AFA Edition
• Connecting the front and back ends of the business
• You can walk, crawl, and run with NetSuite
• Case study: Beyond implementation

The apparel, footwear and accessories (AFA) industry is fast-paced, always changing, and constantly presenting new challenges for the companies operating in it.

Labor shortages, high inflation and elevated interest rates are also pushing companies to rethink how they run their domestic and global operations, particularly with consumers thinking more frugally right now.

Whether it’s a luxury brand that makes handbags, a fast-fashion company that produces the latest clothing styles or a wholesaler importing fabric from global suppliers and using it to make scarves and other accessories, these companies need robust, unified technology platforms to manage their global supply chains, automate accounting processes, generate financial reports, and provide real-time visibility into cash flow.

Apparel companies need a 360-degree view of customer interactions to enable personalized marketing campaigns, too.

Disconnected systems slow growth

The reality is that many apparel companies rely on manual processes, disconnected legacy systems and spreadsheets to run their business. QuickBooks for accounting, Fishbowl for inventory management and Shopify Plus for ecommerce is a common trio, for example, with some companies also using industry-specific enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions like Full Circle and BlueCherry.

In most cases, these disparate solutions don’t share data with other systems. Getting the right data for making timely decisions and creating 360-degree views of business operations requires a lot of manual work and spreadsheet-based data sharing. As a result, apparel companies have very little visibility into their actual costs or how to properly price their products to maintain healthy margins.