Scaling with ease: How KOOKAÏ streamlined global fashion operations

KOOKAÏ was founded in Paris in 1983 with the goal of providing high-quality clothing and accessories at affordable prices. By 1992, the brand ventured into Australia under the leadership of two new founders. 

What started as a single boutique in Melbourne, quickly grew to over 51 locations across Australia and New Zealand. They now manage their own manufacturing facilities, operate six global websites, and manage nearly 165 retail stores spanning Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.

In 2017, KOOKAÏ Australia acquired its European parent company embarking on the mission to align the French and Australian branches under a single global brand.  Recognizing the importance of maintaining a consistent and seamless customer experience across their online platforms and physical stores, the KOOKAÏ leadership team knew they needed to upgrade their current technology and integrations. 

The team aimed to gain a comprehensive understanding of their data without causing any disruption to the business operations.

To address KOOKAÏ’s challenges without interrupting ongoing business operations, Scott opted for a systematic, phased approach to the integration project. In the initial stage, Scott’s’s team utilized Celigo to concurrently operate the old and new systems before merging both with the new NetSuite ERP. This strategy afforded the technical teams the necessary time to seamlessly transition systems through short-term and long-term integrations, ensuring minimal disruption to existing business functions.

Next, the team prioritized enhancing data visibility across all their systems. Specifically, they sought an efficient way to extract data from various websites and their retail boutiques’ POS systems. Following the integration with Celigo, the team could access customer payment data in their ERP within five minutes.

“We were able to integrate that point of sale system really quickly and have all that data come through at a high general ledger level to allow us to continue to trade,” Scott said. “Very shortly thereafter, we moved to full transaction by transaction integration with Celigo.”

The team successfully integrated all their systems, providing the necessary data to drive intelligent business decisions.

“We’re able to use our reporting to see live sales, live manufacturing, our current stock and flow in the business and make fast business decisions based on that,” Scott said.

After effectively bridging the gap between their legacy and new systems, Scott and the team explored additional integration and automation processes with Celigo.

KOOKAÏ utilized the Celigo platform to integrate their email and SMS marketing automation platform. Now, they can push customer and behavioral data from their ERP directly into their marketing automation platform. This has allowed KOOKAÏ’s marketing team to target the right campaigns to the right audiences. They also integrated their Shopify sites across all six websites. The off-the-shelf Celigo Shopify integration eliminated the previously required manual processing, saving the ecommerce team hours of tedious work.

“The Shopify integration paid for itself just by removing that manual data entry,” said Murray.

The team isn’t stopping there. They have plans to move their ecommerce business to Shopify Markets and Shopify POS to centralize their global sales using Celigo for those integrations.