Case Study: Saint and Sofia

Saint and Sofia: Integrated Systems for Sustainable Fashion

Saint and Sofia have created one of the most sought-after and reputable brands in fashion. Incredible to think that the brand was only established in 2020, is 100% ecommerce without a high street presence and distributes around the world.

Maybe this is because Saint and Sofia do things differently.

They create wearable design-led pieces, backed by sustainable production and an ethical supply chain: a network of family-owned factories, which are all guaranteed fair prices for their work. And for their customers, it’s all at a price to rival the Great British high street.

Of course, they also have an amazing team. Based out of London with a team of over 50 people, Saint and Sofia have offices and fulfilment centres in the USA, UK and Europe supporting over 500,000 customers

Saint and Sofia is led by Dessislava Bell, Chief Operating Officer and co-founder. She is also one of Ernst & Young’s Winning Women and Management Today’s 30 under 30 and has won the National Business Award for E-Commerce Strategy.

Migration from ERP to Xero and Unleashed

Efficient and sustainable European manufacturing and worldwide distribution needs efficient systems. ERP software was chosen when Saint and Sofia was founded but very early on it was found to be too rigid and lacking efficient integrations to core systems such as Shopify, which is Saint and Sofia’s main ecommerce platform.

Saint and Sofia needed flexibility to grow a new brand efficiently but most of all they needed to know that any solution would be scalable to cope with a million-plus customers.

Outserve were brought in to advise and scope the right tech stack* to manage the growth potential of both the brand and the team.

Saint and Sofia needed a Tech Stack* to solve the following key areas in their business

• International Accounting and Taxes
• Manufacturing
• Inventory Management
• E-commerce Order Management and Order Fulfilment
• Integration of Warehouse Management

After working with Saint and Sofia to understand the current issues with their existing ERP we recommended the following solutions:

• Xero - for international accounting
• A2X - For Shopify ecommerce accounting integration
• Unleashed - for an Inventory Management System (IMS) and Shopify integration for order Management (OMS)
• Fathom - for monthly reporting and board packs

Henry Young, Head of Finance of Saint and Sofia, said:

'At Saint and Sofia we are technically proficient in most areas of our systems but having Outserve complete the complex ecommerce integration across international markets saved us time.

Working with Outserve has allowed us to go from 90% of our orders automated for inventory and accounting to 99%. This has saved significant time. Now we are looking to work together again to get the last 1% and become 100% automated.

A2X saves us hours of manual accounting work every week and working with Outserve as an A2X partner means that we can get new channels set up quickly and correctly, with ongoing support, which is essential as we grow our business and add more complexity.

We need to focus on what we do best and having Outserve as a partner for Xero ecommerce integrations and inventory and stock management support is like having an outsourced systems team so we don’t need to have our own.”