Growing Luxury Homeware Brand Brings Cin7 to the Table

Avenida Home, founded  by innovative international consultant Isabel Saiz in 2012 in Bath, England, is a family-owned design house and wholesaler of distinctive, art-driven tablescape and lifestyle products. Known for its playful yet refined collaborations with international artists, Avenida Home has grown into a global brand stocked by Liberty London and leading retailers worldwide. 

Avenida Home’s Design for Success

According to Luis Lalor, Isabel’s son and director at Avenida Home, putting art on the table is what Avenida Home is all about.

“We license and buy artwork, and we take those original designs and rework them, something my mum is particularly good at doing, into our handcrafted products to make a special and a bit more whimsical piece than the more traditional brands you would find in our marketplace.”

Their focus on creating artistic, high quality products that are both practical and decorative is not the only thing that sets them apart. 

“As a small business, we needed some form of competitive advantage,” Luis explains. “So, we reached out to smaller suppliers and smaller factories to help us provide a curated, not mass produced, product.”

Developing one-of-kind, collectible products with the help of other small businesses and securing a lucrative deal with luxury retailer Liberty London catapulted Avenida Home to Mona-Lisa-level success. The now multi-million dollar wholesaler (which also has a “white label” side to the business where the team helps develop and produce other major brands) showcases their tablescape designs in stores—big and small—across the globe.

Yet, like many growing businesses, their tech stack became a bottleneck. Their bespoke CRM and content management system could no longer handle their inventory or the international complexity as the business took off.  

“We needed a merchandising platform, a B2B portal, and a way of managing our stock and our inventory,” Luis says. “We needed something that could connect to our accounting software, our payments, and we needed to move our fulfillment because we had moved to a new warehouse in the Netherlands to deal with some of the challenges of the UK exiting the European Union, including tariffs and extra taxes.”

Their initial move to WooCommerce left them with high costs and limited functionality. They needed something more robust, intuitive, and that was built for wholesale. 

“We moved to WooCommerce, which is really a direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform, and they felt we could create a solution for us. It didn’t work at all.”

Cin7: A Feast for Avenida Home’s Eyes (and Pocketbook)

Their only option was to pivot to another solution—except the other options they looked at were too complicated and too big. Until they discovered Cin7.

“We were introduced to Cin7 by a colleague of ours at the time, and Cin7 was a lifesaver, especially with its inventory capabilities as well as the simplicity of creating purchase and supplier orders and how easy it was to link to our new warehouse. It was very similar to how we were doing things before, so it kind of rescued us.”

After a straightforward implementation that included help from the Cin7 Academy, Luis and his small team began counting the wins from finding and investing in the right solution. One of those wins was Cin7’s availability report.

“With the availability report, we can see stock on hand, stock that’s allocated, stock that’s coming in from suppliers and that’s in transit. Before, we handled it all manually, but now, Cin7 does it automatically,” Luis says.

He adds: “Managing orders and our stock isn’t a headache anymore. Everything is accurate, and we can tell our customers when we can deliver. It used to take up an awful lot of time, and I would say it’s saved us about 20% to 30% of our time.”

That’s a significant, and let’s be honest, chic benefit, but there are even more benefits, including Cin7 helping Avenida Home:

• Improve efficiency and accuracy. Cin7’s reports have replaced manual processes and rooted them in data. “We were discussing that we needed to reduce our range of designs from 13 to 8, so I ran a sales report of the last three years of those SKUs, and we could see the worst selling ones. We have the data to make the right decision.”
• Increased customer insights. Cin7 centralizes customer activity, preferences, and history, allowing Avenida Home to prospect smarter and personalize service. “It’s great for looking at our customer activity when we’re prospecting. I can see how much customers have ordered, when their last order was, when I last contacted them, and I can make decisions about what I’m going to talk to them about based on that specific information—we’re less forgetful and more organized.”
• A seamless B2B portal. Retail buyers now log in directly to view stock, pricing, and collections. “Cin7’s B2B portal was something we needed to get up and running quickly. It’s very practical, it’s very easy to manage, and we use it regularly.”

Laying the Table for Future Success

For Luis, investing in Cin7’s user-friendly IMS is like adding a work of art to an already impressive collection. Avenida Home is now preparing to expand into new markets, including Japan, and explore new sales channels such as Amazon and B2C e-commerce.

“If someone is a wholesaler, and they need a merchandising platform to manage their stock and supply chain, Cin7 is excellent. It gives smaller B2B businesses with smaller budgets the tools to manage like a global brand.”