Draper James Gains Foundation to Grow Graciously with NetSuite

SAN MATEO, Calif., Sept. 20, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Oracle NetSuite, one of the world's leading providers of cloud-based financials / ERP, HR, Professional Services Automation (PSA) and omnichannel commerce software suites, announced today that Draper James, a fast-growing Southern-influenced apparel and homewares line founded by actor Reese Witherspoon, has implemented and gone live with NetSuite's Retail Apparel Edition in 144 days to power its financials, inventory, customer and order management processes. Draper James now has an end-to-end view of the business across its wholesale distribution, ecommerce channels and three brick-and-mortar locations, to enable seamless omnichannel experiences for its customers and retail partners.

Witherspoon founded Draper James as a tribute to her Southern heritage and gracious Southern living, and in particular her grandparents, William James Witherspoon and Dorothea Draper – who never left the house without her pearls or wedding ring and always drove her white Cadillac with the proper driving gloves. To realize its mission to give everyone a taste of that contemporary yet timeless Southern style Witherspoon grew up with, Draper James needed to scale operations for growth across expanding channels – which included ecommerce, plans to open brick-and-mortar locations and engage in B2B partnerships with leading retailers.

When running a clothing line whose founder is an internationally acclaimed actor, a big part of delivering a great customer experience is ensuring that whatever Witherspoon is pictured wearing is available for purchase. And when a dress can sell out in mere minutes after she is photographed wearing it, ensuring supply matches demand is crucial.

That wasn't so hard to do when Draper James first launched as an online brand in 2015. But demand for its dresses, t-shirts - adorned with phrases like "howdy," - and friendly, powder blue gingham stationery, grew across the country. People everywhere from Greenville S.C. to Greenwich, Conn. were looking to incorporate a bit of Southern charm into their lives.  

"We really needed to have unified data to remove the barriers between channels," said Melissa Baird, VP of Systems and Procedures for Draper James. "If a customer shopped in the Lexington store, and the only dress left in the network was in Nashville, we wanted to allow the customer the ability to easily purchase it from an iPad and have it delivered directly to the location of their choice."

Draper James couldn't meet the buy-anywhere customer expectation and wasn't pleased with its previous inventory management processes, being forced to perform time-consuming, error-prone and inefficient manual workarounds in Excel. Disparate systems held the company back from getting to know its customers better, and from ensuring that what they wanted to buy was in stock. It knew sustainable, efficient growth depended on managing and maintaining flexible inventory across channels.

Draper James implemented NetSuite's Retail Apparel Edition in June 2017 in 144 days using NetSuite SuiteSuccess; a methodology designed to deliver faster time to value, increased business efficiency, flexibility and greater customer success. SuiteSuccess leverages NetSuite's depth of experience in the retail industry and business operations functionality, including preconfigured dashboards for retail-specific roles and reports with business intelligence for retailers that provides insight into top selling items, units per transaction, shrink reports, sales per hour, sell-through figures and retail stock-ledger.

"Since we're such a young business, we needed a vendor flexible enough to allow us to morph and grow as a company," Baird said. "We wanted a good partner for the long run — a like-minded vendor that understood what we were trying to do as we scaled as a company."

NetSuite allows Draper James to manage its business across ecommerce, wholesale distribution and brick and mortar channels in a smarter way, maintaining flexible inventory and avoiding stock-outs. Efficient, lean operations allow Draper James to keep a laser focus on listening to customers, detecting patterns and focusing on adding value to the customer journey across its different retail touch points.

Since implementing NetSuite, the now 30-employee company has forged wholesale distribution partnerships with luxury retailers like Nordstrom and Net-a-Porter, and opened brick and mortar stores in Nashville, Dallas and Lexington. The business is headquartered in New York, with a warehouse in Greenville, S.C. and much of its manufacturing done in the south.

NetSuite provides an end-to-end view of business for retailers such as Draper James across wholesale distribution and ecommerce channels, as well as company brick-and-mortar locations, to enable seamless, omnichannel experiences for customers.

NetSuite's cloud-based software removes complexity, and allows fast-growing companies with many remote workers to run best-in-class processes without high implementation costs and overhead associated with managing on-premise software. In turn, the business can adopt new functionality when it needs it to reach new goals.  For more information on NetSuite's products, please visit http://www.netsuite.com.

About Oracle NetSuite 
Oracle NetSuite pioneered the Cloud Computing revolution in 1998, establishing the world's first company dedicated to delivering business applications over the internet. Today, it provides a suite of cloud-based financials / Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), HR and omnichannel commerce software that runs the business of companies in more than 100 countries.

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About Oracle
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SOURCE Oracle NetSuite

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