Faherty Brand Drives Efficiency and Scalability in Retail Operations

Faherty Brand has been around for 11 years. It was founded by twin brothers as a small family operation, and we’re still owned by the original family. 

We’re a casual basics clothing brand based in New York, and we’ve experienced a lot of exciting expansion. We opened our 67th store today!

As the Retail Operations Manager, I focus on retail systems and processes —so I help get the stores the supplies they need for their day-to-day operations, as well as manage technology procurement and troubleshooting with the team.

We’re a growing brand. When I started, we were fifteen stores, and in a few years, we expanded to 67. So naturally, our systems and processes needed to evolve since we were previously doing things pretty manually. When it came to purchasing, it was a free for all. We would conduct a monthly expense report, but we didn’t have one dedicated place for everyone to go for supplies. 

We were customers of W.B. Mason and then Staples Advantage for a while, and we didn’t fully leverage those features, so it still felt like the Wild Wild West. People would just place orders and that would go straight to fulfillment — we didn’t have approvals in place. Neither one of those vendors had everything we needed, so we really needed a one-stop shop. We found that our teams were confused about where to shop for certain items.

Most importantly, opening a new store — there’s a massive list of what you need to purchase. And we had to go to many different vendors to purchase everything we needed. A huge benefit of Order.co, and what excited us, was bringing all of our vendors into one place.

We started preparing 8 weeks in advance — setting up all of our systems and ordering supplies. It would take anywhere from two to three days to place orders; we had a document with all the items and their corresponding vendors. 

Naturally, when you have so many different vendors, and then you have tracking in different places, it could take up to two weeks of time for a new store opening because you’re not only placing the orders but making sure everything arrived and troubleshooting when it didn’t. 

There’s a lot of back and forth with tracking orders, digging through emails, and fun stuff like that.

We actually weren’t. Our prior VP had joined and noticed that we were spending too much time chasing vendors and orders, and it was challenging to know what we were spending at each location. Of course, you can tally it up when you’re reconciling credit card purchases, but it was really hard for us to get a grasp on what stores were spending on supplies, as well as that new store opening process.

Our old VP mentioned Order.co because he used it at SuitSupply and an organization before that. He had a lot of great things to say about Order.co. Within his second or third day, he said, “You have to reach out to Order.co.”

There were a lot of exciting features to us. The biggest was bringing all of our vendors into one place, setting budgets per location, and setting up multi-step approval processes, if needed. 

What I liked through the demo was that everything is pretty self-service. It’s rare that I have to reach out to support for help because all of the tools are right in the platform. In past experiences, sometimes you need an account manager to help you set everything up — approvals, adding locations — so the fact that Order.co is very straightforward and easy to self-manage is great, especially at the quick rate that we are moving. It allows us to be very independent.

Another feature that was really exciting to us is that you can customize the view for your store. With most other ordering platforms, you can control the items your team sees, but can’t change any product or category names. I really like that Order.co gives you full customization and we can use internal language that makes sense to our retail employees. For example, ‘direct thermal printing rolls’ — that product name doesn’t mean anything to our team. Internally, we call them shipping labels rolls. Instead of using the technical term, we renamed it so users can find it in our catalog. 

The product lists have been really helpful for our new store openings. What used to take us days now takes five minutes. It’s just one click of the button and then it’s all in your cart and you’re good to go. 

We have a high focus on sustainability — and it can be very hard to find day-to-day supplies that’s sustainable. We try to emphasize little to no plastic products, we love recycled materials. Those are things you have to jump through extra hoops to find. When we created our Order.co catalog, we made sure that the products we added fit with our brand ethos.

Mostly around budgets and reporting — understanding spend thresholds, ordering cadence since we like to stick to a bimonthly schedule, and spend by location. 

It’s very clear to our store teams — right when they log into Order.co, they can see their budget for the month and how much they have left.

It also helps us identify trends. The most recent example, we built out the 2024 budget based on 2023 spend reports since we were able to understand which months had higher operational tasks or more events. It helped us see those trends and then forecast for the upcoming year. We actually increased our budget per location because we realized that every month we were getting right up on the budget or needed to slightly overspend. 

And, it’s all in one place. The problem with other ordering platforms is that we purchased a third of what we needed on the platform, and then went elsewhere for the rest — so spending outside of the platform wasn’t captured and accounted for in the budget.

First of all, you need Order.co. Absolutely worth it. 

It’s very self-service, so it won’t be frequent when you find yourself needing to reach out for help. But that said, everyone at Order.co is very helpful, kind, respectful and responsive. If there ever was an issue, I got answers very quickly. 

I’ve been impressed with the amount of feature enhancements in the last year. Something important for retail ops managers to consider is a software solution’s roadmap and understanding what they are working on. When you sign up for a platform, you’re getting their current offerings, but you’re also getting upcoming enhancements. 

You’ll have a lot of great partners at Order.co — and you’ll be pleased with the ease of the platform for both the store teams and the retail ops manager role. You’ll be very happy with all the tools available to you.