The Scarpetta Profile 

The Scarpetta is an online retailer for women’s designer shoes, offering thousands of brand name shoes at prices everyone will love. They pride themselves on providing high quality fashion at budget-friendly prices, fast shipping, and exceptional customer service.

Solution Partners: ChannelAdvisor

Market: International

Industry: Designer Shoes

Background

Adam Dwidari, owner of The Scarpetta, was looking for a way to make ends meet in college. He started selling bicycles, only to find that seasonal products weren't the best source of consistent income. After experimenting with other products like microwaves and furniture, Dwidari stumbled upon a shoe liquidation sale from a major eCommerce company. He purchased some of the shoes and listed them online. They did so well that he reached out to different vendors to source more shoes. One success led to the next, and after graduating from school, he found himself leaving one of the largest financial institutions in the country to start his own online shoe store, The Scarpetta.

Challenge

Inventory chaos

When The Scarpetta launched, Dwidari says they were using a simple spreadsheet to manage inventory. They didn’t have an inventory tracking system, which made it nearly impossible to find a specific item easily. “Our 13,000 square feet of warehouse space was filled top to bottom with women's designer shoes and organized alphabetically by designer, which was over 200 brands,” he says. “When a shoe would sell, we would have to search between hundreds of shoes, looking multiple times to find the exact one that sold.” To make matters worse, his team was doing manual  inventory counts almost monthly because the counts were only good for about two weeks before overselling would start to occur. The inventory count itself would take two days to complete. “We quickly found that a simple spreadsheet would not suffice. We knew we needed an innovative solution.” says Dwidari.

 

 “All aspects of The Scarpetta online shoe company have been improved, accelerated, and made tremendously more efficient because of SkuVault.”

Solution

Eliminated manual inventory counts

With the implementation of SkuVault, he says they now know precisely where any shoe is at any moment with the use of bin locations. When adding new inventory, they no longer need to organize shoes by designer name. Instead, they simply add the new shoes where space is available. Mixing the designers makes it easy to spot the shoe they are looking for when picking orders. This also means that manual inventory counts are no longer needed. “Thanks to the audit function, we're constantly auditing inventory while adding new shoes to shelves simultaneously,” says Dwidari. The ability to integrate with other softwares also eliminates the need for manual inventory updates and syncs. He says they enjoy the item history feature that makes it easy to see when an item was last scanned, added, removed, and experienced any location changes.

Results

Increased efficiency and fewer oversells

After some time spent with SkuVault inventory and warehouse management system, Dwidari says their picking and shipping is no longer an all day process. In fact, it’s a same day process. They now have the ability to pick, pack, and ship over 150 orders within an hour, dropping their overselling rate to a staggering less than 0.5%. “All aspects of The Scarpetta online shoe company have been improved, accelerated, and made tremendously more efficient because of SkuVault,” he says. “It would simply be impossible for our business to scale without SkuVault.”