Play Pits went from guessing at inventory to hitting a 98%+ on-time, in-full (OTIF) rate, meaning orders arrive complete and on schedule, and from a month-long spreadsheet scramble to a same-week close, by pairing Cin7 with Fiskal Finance.
Chantel Powell was a working mom of three and her six year old son split his afternoons between basketball and football, and he was coming home smelling, in his mother's words, like a grown man. Chantel went looking for a natural, kid-friendly deodorant she could trust. She couldn't find one. So she made one herself.
Her son loved it enough to tell her she should sell it to everyone else too. His teammates wanted it. Then their moms. Then friends of friends. What started as one mother solving one problem in her kitchen became Play Pits, a hygiene brand for kids and families built on the idea that staying fresh shouldn't mean using products full of chemicals nobody can pronounce.
As word of mouth turned into wholesale orders and wholesale orders turned into national retail conversations, Play Pits ran into a problem that has nothing to do with deodorant: the backend couldn't keep up with the growth.
Before Cin7, Play Pits was running on spreadsheets and instinct. Inventory accuracy sat around 60 to 70 percent, with a lot of manual guessing filling in the gaps. Their case pack counts didn't match what actually shipped. Plus lot numbers went untracked until they turned into write-offs or forced the team to hold excess safety stock just in case. Talk about a smelly situation.
Month-end was worse. Untangling Shopify sales, retail purchase order receipts, and warehouse count sheets by hand took three to four weeks after the month had already closed. Chantal was ready for a change.
"We were spending easily 15 to 20-plus hours every single week just playing spreadsheet detective, calculating landed costs, updating inventory across channels, and manually matching POs."
That was time Chantel wasn't spending on the brand itself.
Play Pits brought in Cin7 to handle inventory and operations, and financial partner Fiskal Finance to turn that data into clean, current books. The two work in tandem: Cin7 feeds inventory and order data straight into Xero, and Fiskal uses that feed to close the books fast instead of chasing down numbers after the fact.
"Now that Cin7 feeds straight into Xero, Fiskal gets our month-end inventory closed out in a few business days without the massive headache."
“As Cin7’s Accounting Partner of the Year, we’ve invested heavily in understanding how to get the Cin7-to-Xero integration right and have built proprietary tools to ensure the data flows where it should. The result is a faster, more efficient month-end close, giving our clients access to accurate financial data sooner so they can make better-informed decisions, faster.”
- Pierre Goldie, Fiskal Finance
As Play Pits has scaled, the partnership has grown with it. Fiskal brought on a dedicated team member to handle the purchase planning cycle, working in Cin7 operationally as an extension of the team, moving Play Pits away from reactive firefighting and toward a predictive inventory strategy.
"This is what a true partnership looks like."
Play Pits' first major retail launch, with Target, happened before Cin7 was in place. It was, in Chantel's words, trial by fire.
"The Target launch was trial by fire. We didn't have Cin7 yet, so there was a ton of manual oversight, late-night firefighting, and learning retail compliance the hard way."
By the time CVS came calling, the operational foundation looked completely different.
"By the time the CVS launch rolled around, we had our Cin7 data rules, 3PL protocols, and Fiskal financial workflows fully built out, so other than learning the new retailer's terms and portals, it was much smoother."
Onboarding a major retailer still takes two to four months overall, since each retailer runs its own compliance process on its own timeline. But on Play Pits' side of that process, having Cin7 in place shaved three to four weeks off internal setup, keeping the team ready to ship the moment a retailer gave the green light.
Fiskal built 13-week cash flow models that connect Play Pits' inventory lead times with real-time sales and Xero data. That visibility mattered most when the team was preparing for large production runs to stock store shelves nationwide.
"That clear cash visibility lets us map out our exact cash burn against retail payment terms. It gave us the confidence to negotiate supplier deposit schedules and scale production without stressing over whether we'd blow up our day-to-day cash flow."
The result on the operations side has been a consistent 98 percent-plus on-time, in-full rate, up from a period marked by case pack mapping errors and shipping delays. Chantel estimates operational errors are down by about 60 percent since making the switch, with the system now catching misaligned SKUs and pricing mismatches before they become expensive retail chargebacks.
Play Pits isn't stopping at deodorant and body wipes. The brand is building out a full personal care line, growing its direct-to-consumer business, and adding retail doors across the country, with a goal of becoming the leading hygiene solution for kids and families nationwide.
"With Cin7, Xero, and Fiskal holding down our backend, we're built to scale 5x without breaking a sweat."