Growers House Plants Seeds for a Better Omnichannel Experience

Growers House, a family owned-and-operated hydroponics supply and indoor gardening center in Tucson, Ariz., was in the market for a retail management platform that would help it integrate data across its various business channels — retail store, e-commerce site, online marketplaces (Amazon.com, eBay), wholesale.

Having to manage all of that data, from customer data to order data to shipping data, across multiple systems was a challenge for Growers House, which was seeing rapid growth in the business. It was leading to inefficiency on the back end for Growers House's employees, and a disjointed experience for customers who were engaging and transacting with the brand across multiple channels.

After a lengthy process of evaluating different retail management platforms, Growers House selected Brightpearl, in large part due to its recent integration with Magento. That integration has provided Growers House with a platform that can scale with the business — it's grown close to 100 percent year-over-year for the last four years — while providing a unified experience for both its customers and employees.

“When evaluating systems over about six months — probably looking at 40 and demoing three or four pretty heavily for a few months, Brightpearl seemed to be easiest to fit our business model and it’s flexible enough to let us mold the software to our organizational business flow,” explains David Keith, director of operations at Growers House.

The majority of Growers House's revenues come from wholesale buyers, yet online accounts for the bulk of orders. The company also has a physical store in its hometown. In the past, Keith said Growers House's employees had to manually put all orders from the call center, retail store, eBay, Amazon and its website into their system. Not surprisingly, this was a time-consuming task, and it prevented employees from working on other projects. Now that Growers House uses Brightpearl, all of the different channel data is stored and processed in one place.

“We can see all of our pricing, customer inquiries, everything all within the Brightpearl interface,” says Keith. “It’s consistent, so it’s a lot easier for us training the users and for them, not having to learn and navigate three, four or five different systems.”

Keith added that this seamlessness isn’t just helpful to Growers House's employees. For example, pricing and inventory are now consistent on every buying platform, ensuring Growers House customers always see the same price, regardless of where they buy.

This improved shopping experience has in turn led to more repeat, loyal customers for Growers House. Using Brightpearl's platform, Growers House is able to personalize the shopping experience by leveraging purchase history to suggest relevant products, driving up average order values. Furthermore, order fulfillment is expedited.

“When we see that people want to add and expand their product selection or improve whatever they're building, we have the ability to say, ‘this works really well with that. If you’re interested in one of these, here’s what we recommend’,” notes Keith.

In the future, Keith says Growers House anticipates adding more distribution centers for online and wholesale orders as well as retail stores to satisfy the demand from its blossoming customer base.