Custom experiences for long-term customer satisfaction.

Fashion changes on a dime, but the retail landscape itself is a rapidly changing space. New features are constantly being introduced to the customer experience and quickly become an expected norm in the minds of consumers. As more brands dig into omnichannel opportunities, new experiences—like the ability to pre-order apparel and accessories that haven’t yet arrived in stores or warehouses—emerge as must-haves for modern retail brands.

ANINE BING identified that a pre-order opportunity for customers would add significant value to their offerings on multiple levels. Not only would they be giving customers a desirable experience by empowering them to pre-commit (and therefore guarantee access) to items before their arrival, but they would also support their internal operations by gathering early data to gauge design interest, helping their them get ahead of hot-ticket items and helping their retailers reduce the risk on purchase orders. ANINE BING called on Orium to work through identifying and implementing the right solution to meet their needs on a global scale.

While pre-order solutions do exist out of the box, they’re not always as comprehensive as a retailer might need. One key feature that ANINE BING was looking for was to allow pre-orders on both new and existing apparel products, which quickly proved to be a gap in other available solutions that were evaluated. To get the solution that would satisfy their unique needs, ANINE BING leaned into their partnership with Orium to design and build a custom solution, keeping both scope and later-term maintenance in mind.

While pre-order might sound like a simple feature to launch, with a quick turnaround time, that isn’t always the case. There are a few things to consider when building and deploying a pre-order feature for a retailer, such as how far in advance can items be listed for pre-order, what the change in notification flows look like for customers who do order pre-order items, and what the fulfillment triggers become once the goods are received in-store or in-warehouse.

ANINE BING and Orium worked closely together to best decide which platform would own the majority of the pre-order features, workshopping through how the relevant platforms would integrate together, with a high focus on the relationship between ANINE BING’s ERP, OMS, and POS platforms.

After careful consideration and market evaluation, ANINE BING and Orium determined a custom flow was necessary to satisfy the program requirements. Together, we designed a custom pre-order flow that would route through ANINE BING’s various platforms and fit neatly into the retailer’s existing order routing logic.

We decided that the ERP would own and manage all pre-order inventory, and that those inventory numbers would be housed in a separate virtual warehouse. This allowed for the easy segregation of on-hand inventory from inventory that had yet to be received, and allowed for easier reporting on pre-order sales versus on-hand inventory sales.

The work done in ANINE BING’s ERP was then replicated across other platforms, such as the OMS. This allows ANINE BING’s other platforms to read the data similarly to the OMS and simplifies reporting across different softwares. With that done, ANINE BING’s OMS, POS, and ecommerce platform are free to list pre-order inventory as available to sell, and those orders are routed back to the virtual warehouse created and managed in ANINE BING’s ERP.

With ANINE BING’s pre-order feature launched and in-use, ANINE BING and Orium are free to turn their attention to the retail software industry’s next big thing. Orium looks forward to remaining both ANINE BING’s idea partner and developmental partner in the ever changing world of fashion and apparel.