From childhood bush walks in New Zealand to years of ocean exploration, CaliWoods founder and owner Shay Lawrence had vast opportunities to revel in the beauty of nature. But there was a blight on her enjoyment: plastic pollution. So, she vowed to do something about it.
Shay has spent much of her life travelling, exploring the warm, soft sands of isolated beaches, surfing the sparkling blue waters of the world’s oceans—and picking up bottle caps, plastic straws, and fish nets everywhere she went.
“I saw firsthand pretty much all the plastic pollution in the ocean. I don’t think people really grasp how widespread it really is. I went to beaches in the middle of nowhere, and there was plastic from the 1970s.”
Though incredibly disheartening, the prolific waste inspired Shay to open CaliWoods in 2017. This woman-led social enterprise offers customers reusable, sustainable kitchenware, personal care products, and home and lifestyle products. As a certified B Corp, it meets the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability.
CaliWoods is wholeheartedly committed to being a force for good in the world, and its efforts go beyond selling eco-friendly products.
Unfortunately, Shay and her team’s heartfelt desire to greenify the planet was hampered by manual spreadsheets they used to run the business. Recognizing the issue, they wasted no time in making a much-needed change.
CaliWoods first product in 2017 was a reusable straw, which came in different shapes and sizes. It was initially sold at New Zealand’s Sunday markets, but the product (which wasn’t mainstream at the time) caught the eye of several retailers. Eight years later, the company is now selling 50+ non-toxic, plastic-free products in their online store and through the efforts of their B2B partners.
“The initial growth was pretty cool, but as we grew, we had to figure out how to navigate the systems needed to scale with a small team,” Shay says.
Their original systems? Spreadsheets for inventory management, Shopify for their online store, and Xero for accounting. Shay quickly realized that doing weekly stock takes, adding SKUs manually, and attempting to order inventory using unintegrated applications was an incredibly unsustainable way to operate.
Their solution? Invest in TradeGecko, a popular cloud-based inventory and order management platform. “TradeGecko was quite common in New Zealand at the time.”
Until it was discontinued and no longer a renewable option.
Cin7 hit all the right notes for CaliWoods, so, with zero time to waste, they moved forward with the implementation. All in, it took about two months to sunset TradeGecko and implement Cin7, which Shay says was a smooth experience thanks in large part to the help provided by Cin7 experts. And after the implementation was complete, everything fell into place just as smoothly.
“Once we got up and running, everything was easy.”
Cin7 was a breath of fresh air for the CaliWoods team. Cin7’s seamless integrations with Shopify, Xero, and Etsy simplified and streamlined their workflows. They gained clear visibility into their 3PL stock—something they didn’t have before Cin7. And they tapped into Cin7’s reporting capabilities, with Shay citing the Stock-by-Branch report as a favorite.
“I run that report heaps to see how the B2B and B2C sales are stacking up through the month and at the end of the month.”
Additionally, monitoring inventory and adding new SKUs to their lineup are no longer toxic (something they know just a little something about) tasks, and the company’s B2B customers can utilize Cin7’s user-friendly B2B Portal. But the biggest (and best) surprise of investing in Cin7? Cin7 ForesightAI.
The incredible benefits of using Cin7 ForesightAI were apparent after only using the demand forecasting tool for a couple of months. With ForesightAI, CaliWoods can now:
“ForesightAI lets me see what we have in stock and know what we need to order per supplier with a click of a button,” she says. “We’re able to make sure that our stock is accurate to the day. It takes the manual errors out of it, it saves us time, and it saves us money in terms of not running out of stock or not ordering too much.”
Shay adds: “It’s also interesting to see which products are winners, losers, or chasers. The data tells you what you don’t know. For example, one of our winners was a personal care product that I never would have thought would be one, and it made us take a closer look at what’s moving fast, and which ones are profitable.”
For Shay, managing her inventory, purchase orders, and sales data along with the other software in her tech stack in a single, centralized solution that offers a fully accessible dashboard and an AI-based forecasting tool helps them do what they do best: supplying their customers with earth-friendly products that foster an intentionally sustainable, low-tox lifestyle.
What’s CaliWood’s plan moving forward? Naturally, they’re eager to increase sales and will focus on streamlining, adding products to their inventory, and enhancing their product education while growing their Cin7 knowledge and expertise.
“Cin7 has the scope to support whatever inventory and growth plans we have!”