Harvey Labels — How a NYFW Label Rapidly Grew its Dropshipping Sales
By: Jimmy Zhong
Tags: Retail Technology, Fashion, Dropshipping, Ecommerce, Marketplaces

Background

In 3 short years, fashion designer and entrepreneur Mim Harvey has built a highly successful online fashion business in Harvey Labels, opened her flagship store, and just recently participated in the New York Fashion Show (NYFW). The core ethos of the Harvey brand is beautifully made multi-way styles at affordable prices, with Mim developing all of her own prints. Mim first started with her namesake label, Harvey the Label, and has since launched two other labels; Seeker Brand, and AILA (collectively Harvey Labels). Based in Adelaide, Australia, Mim has quickly built a global brand, with Harvey Labels now stocked in over 180 online stores.

Harvey the Label Collection during the Fashion Palette show at NYFW (Photo by Randy Brooke/Getty Images

Convincing Partner Stores to Adopt New Software is Challenging

Harvey Labels fires on all cylinders — whether it be online or offline, retail, wholesale, and dropship. With such an ambitious strategy to maximise distribution, Mim needed a way to automate her partner store connections, with real-time inventory updating to avoid over-selling.

The need to connect inventory to partner stores in a quick and straightforward manner was critical due to the perceived time and resource cost required to learn inventory software. Online retail businesses are generally extremely time poor and have a million things in the air at a time, so learning new software would be difficult especially if it is complicated.

Syncio has reduced the friction on this onboarding experience. In order for Harvey Labels to connect with a partner store, all they have to do is send an email inviting them to install Syncio. Once done, the stores are connected with Harvey Labels, with their inventory visible and ready to be synced across in just a few clicks. This means that partner stores can start selling Harvey Labels products much faster.

Out-of-date inventory is a huge problem with a large distribution network

If the large distribution network strategy were to work, inventory would have to be accurate across all online stores. This was crucial as outdated inventory could become costly for Harvey Labels to manage if they had to deal with a large volume of refunds and customer complaints from their partner stores. Even inventory updates every 24 hours may be too infrequent for a distribution network as large as Harvey Label’s.

Thankfully, Harvey Labels no longer needs to worry about this issue thanks to Syncio’s ability to sync inventory across all connected stores in real-time. This means that an order that is made on Harvey Label’s store which takes stock out is also reflected in the inventory of all connected stores, and vice-versa. This has saved substantial amounts of time for Harvey Labels, as sales are now generated organically without any time spent on selling to and following up with the connected stores. Time spent on customer refunds and complaints are also avoided due to up-to-date inventory.

Harvey the Label makes beautiful pieces that can be worn in multiple ways.

Inventory sync creates new business opportunities

Operating in a highly competitive market, partner stores were also reluctant to purchase large amounts of stock due to the initial outlay of capital required. This was very challenging for Harvey Labels to overcome, as without an agreement, Harvey Labels couldn’t be sold on these partner stores.

Now with Syncio making it so easy to dropship across Shopify stores, Harvey Labels can offer their partner stores a quick and easy way to test Harvey styles with their customers without investing much time and money. Harvey Labels now can reach another market easily with orders coming from the partner store fulfilled in their normal process.

Benefits

Harvey Labels have been able to set up an extremely popular and successfully-run dropship program with their partner stores using Syncio as the engine behind it. The ability to scale their distribution to adopt this program required ease of onboarding, minimal time on managing inventory, and minimal capital outlay.

Managing so many sales channels now is simple as all inventory is updated centrally. This increased efficiency has helped Harvey Labels reach more customers and partner stores, creating a reliable and increasing source of revenue in the process.

Tips on growing and working with a large distribution network