True Religion: Ship from Store
Driving Sales and Optimizing Inventory Through Store-Based Fulfillment
Retail stores often struggle with dead inventory—products that sit on shelves but never sell, leading to markdowns, lost revenue, and excess stock at the end of the season. True Religion, like many apparel brands, faced this challenge and needed a way to optimize inventory utilization across its stores and online channels.
Leveraging In-Store Fulfillment (ISF) from my work in building the Milo Retail platform, I developed a custom integration with True Religion’s Full Circle ERP, Manhattan WMS, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) to enable their retail locations to function as fulfillment centers for e-commerce orders. This unlocked in-store inventory, increased full-price sales, and significantly boosted online revenue.
The Challenge
- Underutilized Inventory: Large amounts of stock remained in stores while online demand surged for certain sizes and styles.
- Lost Revenue: Unsold inventory was often discounted or liquidated, eroding margins.
- Inefficient Fulfillment: Customers missed out on purchases because the primary warehouse was out of stock, even when retail locations had available units.
- Logistical Complexity: Moving unsold stock from stores to off-price sales channels required additional labor and costs.
The Solution
I built a custom integration between True Religion’s Full Circle ERP, Manhattan WMS, and SFCC, allowing retail locations to fulfill online orders in real-time. This transformed their stores into micro-distribution centers and introduced key features:
- Real-Time Inventory Sync: Connected Full Circle ERP and SFCC to expose store inventory to e-commerce, enabling customers to purchase products even if the warehouse was out of stock.
- Automated Order Routing: Integrated fulfillment logic to dynamically assign orders to stores based on stock availability and customer proximity, reducing shipping times and costs.
- Retail Associate Fulfillment Dashboard: Store employees used an intuitive web-based interface to pick, pack, and ship orders efficiently.
- Optimized Store Inventory Turnover: Ensured stores could clear out slow-moving inventory through direct-to-consumer e-commerce sales, reducing the need for markdowns or off-price liquidation.
Results and Impact
- Increased e-commerce sales by nearly 20% by exposing previously unavailable in-store inventory online.
- Cleared out excess inventory at full price, reducing reliance on markdowns and off-price liquidation.
- Improved fulfillment efficiency, reducing order processing time to just a few clicks.
- Optimized shipping costs and speed, leveraging store proximity to customers instead of a centralized warehouse.
- Drove multi-million dollar revenue directly to EBITDA by turning retail locations into fulfillment hubs.
- Enabled omnichannel fulfillment at scale, creating a seamless online-to-offline shopping experience.
My Role
- Developed a custom integration with Full Circle ERP, Manhattan WMS, and SFCC to enable seamless in-store fulfillment.
- Designed and implemented real-time inventory synchronization between store stock and SFCC e-commerce.
- Engineered intelligent order routing logic, ensuring optimal fulfillment locations for each order.
- Built the fulfillment UI for store associates, making it simple to process orders with minimal training.
- Led implementation and rollout across True Religion’s store network, providing technical support and training.
- Analyzed fulfillment performance metrics, optimizing routing and store-level inventory turnover.
Why It Matters
Retailers today must maximize inventory efficiency and enable flexible fulfillment strategies to stay competitive. By integrating Full Circle ERP, Manhattan WMS, and SFCC for True Religion, I helped transform their store network into a strategic e-commerce advantage, increasing revenue and improving customer satisfaction.