How does one person manage procurement for 40+ brands? At OpenStore, Yedra Lopez Gragera knew she needed to answer that question even before they acquired their first brand.
OpenStore started in March 2021 with a mission to identify, value, acquire and scale long-tail e-commerce brands while offering liquidity to the entrepreneurs who had grown those brands to their first six to seven figures in annual sales. At first, the operations team (which manages all aspects of supply chain, fulfillment, demand planning, and product development) was just two people. With a company objective to grow to hundreds brands as soon as possible, they knew they would need to find a way to streamline operations and incorporate those hundred unique supply chain management processes into a standardized, repeatable practice that could run with just a few hands.
“Anvyl was the first software I signed off on,” Yedra explains. “My previous work was at a fast fashion company launching 13 collections a year to a thousand stores across Europe. I know how hard it is for buyers, and I know how hard it can be to track all these little pieces across POs. And we made the right choice.”
- Founded in March 2021
- Based in Miami, FL
- Brand Aggregator
- Total raised: $150M
- Valuation: $970M
Business Needs
- Quickly integrate new brands
- Standardize supply chain operations
- Scale without needing to hire
- Integrate with Netsuite ERP
Scaling & Standardizing Supply Chains
OpenStore needed to bring dozens of supply chain processes into one cross-portfolio operation. Here’s how Anvyl made it possible.
OpenStore provides qualifying Shopify entrepreneurs with a cash offer in as little as one business day and continues to grow each acquired brand by creating efficiencies and limiting costs as the portfolio grows. That means processes and systems are key to smooth growth—everything has to plug into a stack that’s as resilient and scalable as possible.
OpenStore started designing that stack immediately. Today, they’re using Anvyl partners Netsuite ERP and Flieber for resource planning and demand planning, respectively, with Anvyl integrated in both directions. Their SCM tech stack lets the team go from forecasting to POs to reconciliation, using Anvyl to manage the order and supplier collaboration phase of their supply chain.
POs come out of the demand planning process and ultimately, once delivered, turn into stock on hand. The journey from creation to delivery, though, is full of nuance and evolution. OpenStore uses Anvyl to track and catalog that journey, including all the specifics of cash in and cash out along the way, and makes it easy for the team to reconcile the initial invoices to what is actually delivered—and all that information flows straight into Netsuite ERP, so it’s easy to see the reality on a P&L.
Onboarding a new vendor is much easier, and unit cost calculations are much easier, because we use Anvyl to standardize as much as possible.
Yedra Lopez Gragara, OpenStore
Crucially, Anvyl makes it easy for new brands to be integrated into the team’s process without creating a need for all the manual work that necessitates hiring. Yedra is able to act as buyer for OpenStore’s current brand portfolio by herself because the merchant integrations team introduces each new brand to Anvyl as quickly as possible.
Then, once the brand has migrated over to OpenStore’s standardized PO process, the work of reporting on the supply chains of 40+ brands becomes much easier and much less time-consuming.
“At previous companies, we would have hours-long meetings to find out the answers to crucial questions,” Yedra says. “We would get a lot of people in a room and ask, ‘when is this order arriving? Can we launch the collection on time?’ With Anvyl tracking our POs, it tells you exactly when something will arrive, which means you don’t need hours and a lot of people—you just need a dashboard.”
Each new brand brings with it a preexisting method of communicating with sourcing and suppliers. Some have a sourcing agent, some work directly with factories, and some place orders through a portal. Anvyl helps OpenStore streamline and track all the different relationships so that the team can report across all their different brands with just three operations team members using Anvyl today.
“When we acquired our first brand last September, they were placing orders on the phone with farmers,” Yedra remembers. “Now we place a PO in Anvyl, they accept, they tell us the price per unit. Onboarding a new vendor is much easier, and unit cost calculations are much easier, because we use Anvyl to standardize as much as possible.”
To get to hundreds of brands, Yedra anticipates needing to add a few more team members, but nowhere near as many as they would without Anvyl. It’s a key advantage that has helped Yedra and the OpenStore team turn dozens of retail companies into one retail company with dozens of brands in less than a year.