Meet Rareform, a recycled bags business that struggled to track their books and unique inventory
Rareform repurposes freeway billboards into one-of-a-kind bags and accessories that are sold in 350 retail stores and online. Alec Avedissian, one of the company's co-founders, faced a major problem: He needed a system that could compile one-time journal entries on a daily and monthly basis. The system also needed to track overall sales and processing fees. He and his brother had tried many different apps to map sales data into Excel and QuickBooks, but they were wasting precious time and thousands of dollars a month on an inefficient process.
How Webgility's software boosted business for Rareform
- Webgility allows Alec to save time and increase work efficiency by overcoming operational roadblocks.
- Through our ecommerce automation software, we have reduced the number of hours spent on busywork. Adding one-of-a-kind products into the inventory management system became less tedious.
- The multichannel order management feature allowed them to access orders that are in stock as well as how many more billboards needed to be reordered.
Rareform video case study transcript
"After college I moved to El Salvador. When I was down there, I started seeing billboards used as roofing on my friends' houses, and it was there that I got the idea of 'What can we do with them?'
"My name is Alec Avedissian—I'm one of the co-founders of the brand Rareform. What we do is we take freeway billboards from all over the country, we bring them in, and we repurpose them into one-of-a-kind bags and accessories. My brother and I started the brand. We sell in about 350 retail stores and then on Rareform.com using Shopify.
"The way we used to do our accounting system was at the end of every month, we would do a one-time journal entry—taking all the sales and the processing fees—so we didn't really know on a day-to-day basis where our sales were. So, being one of the co-founders, I found myself using so many different apps and features and trying to map it in Excel and then put into QuickBooks, and just nothing seemed to work quite right. And Webgility was that software that allows me to now save so much time and energy.
"In terms of setting up Webgility and starting to use it, it was simple. They had somebody contact us that was an expert in QuickBooks Online, so that made it simple. And we did a screen share. They also had an account manner that would work with us in the very beginning and got us set up, and I still talk with her. And then we had somebody on tech support that's on there, you know, every day during business hours that we can call and talk to somebody.
"When we added Webgility we were using an outside bookkeeping firm. They're costing us a few thousand dollars every month to [book] the journal entries, [make] sure the processing fees are correct, and we had to teach them, 'Hey, this is Shopify, this is this platform we use, this is our merchant.' What we've been able to do with Webgility is we've cut those hours probably in half and our spend in half, and made it more automated for our bookkeepers and our accountants.
"At Rareform, every product we make is totally one-of-a-kind, because each billboard we receive is unique as well. So what we have to do is we have to photograph each one, number each one, put it into our inventory system. And Webgility allows us to have access to what we actually have in stock and how much more we need to reorder, when we need to reorder, and it is just key to our business.
"I would actually say one of the great features that Webgility [has] is they [have] a revert button. So when you were mapping everything and pulling things in, if it didn't work—which, a lot of times when you're starting to use a new software program, it really messes up—we were allowed to revert it, and it took two seconds and it was fixed. That was a huge feature that we found helpful.
"I'd recommend Webgility to anybody that's using ecommerce. It's simple, you're gonna save time, you're gonna save money, and it's super easy to use. Why wouldn't you use it?"
- Alec Avedissian, co-founder of Rareform
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