How An Operational Fix Drove Massive Scale for DTC Homeware Retailer Piglet in Bed

In today’s episode, Caroline speaks to Piglet in Bed, a luxury bedding, sleepwear and homeware brand founded in 2017. During the podcast, the brand’s CFO Axel Stelk shares how the Brightpearl-powered brand achieved its incredible YOY sales growth to be named one of the top three fastest growing homeware brands in the UK. He also reveals which tech tools they’ve been using to drive growth – and what they’ll be looking at in future to keep up their impressive momentum. 

Transcript

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Transcript highlights:

• “We rely heavily on e-commerce – about 80% of our sales are coming through our two websites in the UK and the US, but since the beginning of this year, we've branched out quite heavily into B2B. We've started selling through Nordstrom in the US and John Lewis in the UK, both of which have been very, very successful and very quickly shifted our revenue mix.”
  
  
• “We have never been people to look too closely at our competition. I think if anything we were always worried that we might just copy their mistakes. Instead, we’ve tried to do things our way and that definitely helped along the way. But, while it meant we were able to think outside the box, it also meant there were some things that we should have been doing earlier, such as SEO. We didn’t have a background in SEO so we avoided it for the first few years. Then we hired an SEO expert and our organic search volumes have gone through the roof – it really has shown us just how much opportunity there is.
  
  
• “There's a number of things that we did quite unusually – hiring a CFO as the first employee is probably not what most businesses would do. Usually a CFO is probably one of the last hires that you would look at. But one of the things I did very early on was ask: are our unit economics scalable? We said ‘if we're gonna scale this, let's scale this profitably’ so we made some early changes which helped.“
  
  
• “We want to be a brand where organic is the main drive of growth, where customers recommend our products to their friends and family because they're good products and they had great service. At the end of last year, we changed our customer acquisition strategy. It meant the first six months of this year were incredibly stressful but we’ve managed to achieve 60 to 70% organic traffic to our website, which was probably the inverse last year, so we’ve seen a big change very quickly.”
  
  
• “Like most modern brands, we're using a whole myriad of different platforms. I'd say Shopify is definitely at the center of it all for us – it gives us the flexibility to plug in different solutions and upgrade solutions very easily when the time has come. We used to use Klaviyo for CRM but we realized as part of our shift into more organic channels that we needed to upgrade to Ometria for more flexibility and functionality.”
  
  
• “We're currently doing a massive push into upgrading our demand forecasting as well as our merchandising function. A lot of this currently sits in spreadsheets – but it can be done better by technology.” 
  
  
• “To be ranked 24 in Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 is amazing. We've done so much work and having these milestones really validates that our hard work is paying off. It's not just hard work for the sake of it, but it's actually taking us places and probably at a faster rate than other companies, which is very exciting.” 

Top takeaways

• 67% YOY revenue increase in 2020/21
• The tech that’s driven their growth includes: Brightpearl and Ometria
• The business has recently branched out in to B2B sales, stocking its luxury homeware items in John Lewis and Nordstrom
• Implementing Brightpearl has been a key factor in the brand’s success, bringing together every part of the business into one centralized Retail Operating System (ROS)