This time last year, the apparel brand Psycho Bunny was growing quickly, tripling its business under Alen Brandman, who took ownership of the company in 2021. Brandman had worked at Psycho Bunny since 2016 and bought 100% of it from founders Robert Godman and Robert Godley when the brand began to struggle. The company relaunched from a new home base in Montreal and opened its 100th global store this year. It also recently named its first brand ambassador, tennis player Alexei Popyrin. Originally known for ties, Psycho Bunny has evolved to be a general-purpose menswear brand with a focus on polo shirts.
The new ownership, new product focus and brick-and-mortar expansion have equated to rapid growth for the brand. But, early on, the company’s tech stack struggled to keep up with the new growth. The company’s inventory and order management structure lagged as orders came in more rapidly, causing delays in shipments and sometimes orders of products that the brand didn’t actually have in stock.
The problems were manageable at the time, but if Psycho Bunny kept growing at the rate it had been, they would soon become insurmountable, according to Jean-Aymeri de Magistris, Psycho Bunny’s vp of IT, data and analytics.
“Our inventory was completely outpaced by demand,” de Magistris said at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show on Tuesday. “We had been a bit shortsighted at the beginning of our ability to scale, and we needed a new tech stack that had the breadth to support our scaling.”
The need was especially urgent in the middle of last year as Psycho Bunny prepared for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. De Magistris said the team was dreading the idea of going through another holiday season with an outdated system, given the large expected demand.
De Magistris and his team redid their tech stack quickly, working with partners like order management software Fluent Commerce and store fulfillment company Deposco. Along with its partners, Psycho Bunny implemented a global inventory view and features like buy-online, pick-up in-store to take advantage of its growing retail fleet. The redo also included hiring new talent, with de Magistris recruiting for his IT team and seeking out people with IT skills who also had experience with order fulfillment operations. Coming from only seven employees pre-pandemic, Psycho Bunny now has over 1,000 employees.
“They have a lot of business aptitude,” he said. “They don’t have to be taught the business side of things.”
The good thing about making such a big change right before the holiday season is that you can immediately see the effects, de Magistris said. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Psycho Bunny saw a 30% increase in sales, a 33% reduction in average order delivery time and a 93% reduction in canceled orders.
But replacing an entire tech stack is not an easy task. De Magistris stressed that Psycho Bunny made these changes now to avoid the difficulty of making them later when the company is larger and the operations have more moving parts. Psycho Bunny tripled sales last year and will likely keep growing at a similar rate this year, meaning the changes were a requirement.
The headache that a complicated tech stack can cause at scale was echoed by Pacsun’s chief information officer, Shirley Gao, speaking at NRF on Monday.
“From a tech point of view, most of our tech stack is inherited,” Gao said.
She’s been with the brand since 2021, but Pacsun is over 40 years old, and most of its current e-commerce and retail systems were already in place when she joined. Finding new ways to make an established system efficient is a worthwhile effort for any retail brand, she said.
“Some companies are still using Excel for their product information,” she said. “On top of that, you now have additional challenges like working with big marketplaces, integrating with Amazon, and [defining best practices for leveraging] TikTok and social commerce. The biggest challenge is identifying the most critical tech improvements and how to make them. Unless you’re starting from scratch, you have to deal with years of investments made before.”