Brightpearl: On a mission to automate retail

Brightpearl CEO Derek O’Carroll talks to RTIH about the company’s journey from humble startup to omnichannel management system market leader.

Under the leadership of Derek O’Carroll, Brightpearl has achieved significant growth and success over the last few years, with the business growing its annual recurring revenue by 38% and attracting investment of more than $15 million last year.

The UK-based company has developed an omnichannel retail management system that puts orders, inventory, financials, warehousing, PoS and CRM in one place. It was founded in 2008 by Chris Tanner. In 2000, he started a skateboard manufacturing businessand, in an effort to keep operations lean, looked to use software and automation wherever possible. 

Trying to link separate software systems together was frustrating, time consuming and unreliable, so Tanner decided to write his own platform that dealt with the different components in a single system. This was the first prototype of Brightpearl. 

A few years later, hosted e-commerce platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify became commonplace, and marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay opened up for merchants. This created new systems challenges. Brightpearl launched connectors to the major sales channels and is now one of the leading mid-market retail and wholesale management solutions. 

Fast forward to 2019 and it now goes live with around eight customers every few days. A recent example of this is Rude Wines which is tapping Brightpearl’s platform as it looks to scale up its B2C channels.It says that it made the move due to the offering’s “best-in-class retail functionality, combined with seamless Magento integration and powerful CRM module”. 

The retailer has been able to automate the flow of information about its customers, order management, financials and inventory, enabling it to buy the right stock at the right time, prevent mispicks and make quicker, more accurate business decisions.

Mark Baggot, Rude Wines’ Finance Director, comments: “Having looked at several options to streamline and improve our customer delivery and inventory management, Brightpearl’s offering stood out. We’ve high expectations for the future, and we’re confident these can be achieved, especially with our partnership with Brightpearl.”

USPs

O’Carroll came onboard as CEO in April 2016, having previously spent 10 years at Symantec where he held such roles as Senior VP, Global Field Sales and Marketing for Norton. So, what’s the secret of Brightpearl’s success under his leadership? How, for instance, do they usually work with clients? 

“The first thing we do is to make sure that the platform is the right fit for the prospect. That’s because we are built for the sector and we offer fixed price implementation which is pretty unique. So customers are not paying for engineers to write scripts to customise the solution, this is very expensive especially in the long term and is the typical approach of a legacy ERP company” says O’Carroll.

“We are unique in the market as we carry out solution scoping exercise before customers sign a contract. Other vendors will say, ‘what do you need? We do everything, so sign up’. But we’re very focused on a partnership, we need a successful project as the cost of acquisition for a new customer is high.”

Also unique is that, once a client lands on the Brightpearl platform, the company doesn’t outsource the deployment to a professional services firm. It does its own deployments with an internal professional services team “that are experts, not graduates, they’ve done hundreds of deployments,” O’Carroll says. 

“The benefit of that is on two fronts, not just the technology, but more importantly a lot of businesses come to us and we ask the question, what are your operational workflows and how do they support your customer journey requirements? Everyone wants to give a good customer service experience, but you have to map that out to the operational workflows in order to light those experiences up,” he adds.

“At the beginning of a project, our consultants will review our client’s existing processes, because businesses realise they need to change a lot of their internal processes to be successful in today’s market,” O’Carroll continues. 

“Then we go live and it typically takes 18 days of billable professional services work to get someone live which is very fast in comparison to the more traditional approach. Overall it takes roughly 90 days, to train everybody and launch, whereas if you went with a legacy ERP like Netsuite it would typically take 150 days.”

“We are a single solution, a central point to manage all operations required to serve today’s demanding customers with a high level of service, that’s our mission” 

Once a client is live, a customer success representative is included in the contract and they monitor client options and schedule help checks every six months, flagging up for instance if the system is not being used correctly in a certain area. “That’s also pretty unique in the market,” O’Carroll comments.

“The average lifetime value is seven years, so we are very focused on customers up to speed and making them happy, as it is a long term partnership from our perspective,” he says.

Automating retail, managing by exception

In addition to fast and fixed price deployments, the platform is designed for merchants and allows businesses to operate using management by exception procedures because we have a very powerful automation engine which minimises human error which is the cause of a lot of poor customer reviews.

Indeed, Brightpearl’s mission is to ‘automate retail’. O’Carroll believes that this is a key requirement for survival and success in the modern retail landscape.

Following deployment, a customer starts running their business on the platform and very quickly sees processes that are eligible for automation. “We have a very simple, easy to use automation tool that clients typically start turning on in anger three months after they’ve gone live. That’s a real differentiator for us.”

He continues: “We are a single solution, a central point to manage all operations required to serve today’s demanding customers with a high level of service, that’s our mission.”

The true cost of e-commerce

Another key issue in these rapidly changing times is multi-channel merchants levelling the playing field with e-commerce players like Amazon. This is also an area where Brightpearl can help companies. 

“As you trade we create your accounting journals in real-time and that allows our customers to see exactly what the fully loaded costs are and therefore the margin in each particular channel they serve,” O’Carroll states. 

“We’re a purchasing module as well. That’s important because it’s amazing how many merchants out there don’t understand the true fully landed cost of selling their product on their website, never mind Amazon. We come in and very quickly show the customer what the cost of doing business is by channel.”

Brightpearl’s system is flexible, he points out. It allows customers to take a single view and have different packaging and channels and run that automatically if they so choose. For example, you could be selling a coffee maker. In Germany you would be running that under one brand at a different price and then in the US you’d run it under a different brand at another price. You’re doing it all from one central repository and you’re accounting for that correctly. That means you can run pricing and positioning experiments in each channel.

As you understand what the costs are and have the option of flexibility, you can for instance open up an Amazon channel. And if you’re a US or UK trader and decide that your product should be sold in Germany, it only takes a few minutes to set up that channel and get up and running. 

More importantly, however, when doing this you need a full view of the cost of that channel, which is what Brightpearl delivers. You also need to make a decision on how you’re going to fulfil that order; are you going to do it yourself or with a third-party logistics provider or leverage Fulfilled by Amazon?

Each one of these has their own specific costs which impact your margin and retail is ultimately about margin and customer service. That’s how a centralised operational platform like Brightpearl gives customers the flexibility to understand the true cost of operating in each channel and therefore they grow their business outside of Amazon but also with Amazon. 

Since launching in 2008, Brightpearl has grown from two employees to +90 today. Over 1,400 brands are now using its platform, transacting £3 billion in orders, including Yeti (EMEA), Stance (EMEA) and recent new clients such at Help for Heroes, Perfect Moment and Oliver Sweeney. 

It has been an impressive rise through the retail technology ranks and the company appears well placed to build on its various achievements over the coming years.