Edge Accessories purchases Greentree for rapid growth

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Edge Accessories has purchased Greentree International's ERP software. The UK-based company supplies high-fashion items such as jewellery, belts, and scarves to retailers such as Primark, New Look, Zara and Forever 21. In a three-year period it's supplied 20 million such items. Edge Accessories' growth has been impressive since its launch in 2009, and it now boasts a multi- million-dollar annual sales turnover. It's expecting further rapid growth in the European, US and Asian markets.

Edge's design team is tasked with staying six months ahead of the High Street. Their designs are produced in factories in China for shipping in time for the April sales, when the young and trendy are shopping for what they'll be wearing in summer.

"Fashion changes every hour, every day," says Managing Director Mike Lamb. "If Rihanna wears something this afternoon it can be tomorrow's fashion, and it's our role to support the retailer to get it to the shop floor as quickly as possible." Edge decided that to keep pace with tough competition, it needed to modernise its computer systems. Its staff were constantly shuffling between an online product catalogue, Excel spreadsheets, and Sage for invoicing.

"Probably 20-30% of our time was spent re-checking information," Mike says. "Greentree's integration ensures that once information is changed, it's changed throughout the system, so that people aren't making errors. We get lots of large, complex orders because retailers tend to book in batches. Sometimes they'll book 30-40 product lines all at the same time, and processing them could be very slow and cumbersome. We needed a system that could group all those multiple orders from one customer together.

"Our customers rely on us all the time for updates, and we wanted to make sure that we were coding or attributing the products correctly when we put them into the system. Inputting an average of 10,000 product lines a year was one person's full-time job. The way Greentree uploads data from Excel makes our lives so much easier. Just to have the ability to respond to orders immediately, even on the road, is a massive advantage to us, because delays mean lost sales. I was spending too much of my time tracking errors, instead of focusing on growing the business. We don't accept second best in our business, so Greentree was our only option."