A wedding, a suit, and hard-to-find accessories were all that was needed to create The Salty Fox, but the direct-to-consumer, Melbourne-based business’s ability to get to the next level required something more: Cin7.
When Hangatu Wyld and her husband Sean were planning their nuptials, finding his suit was not a problem. But finding him stylish, high quality, and personal accessories was, so Hangatu decided to do something about it.
That something was opening The Salty Fox. “We created a huge range of cufflinks and watchbands and had a really great customer base, but what I was finding was that I was selling mostly to women who were purchasing the product for the men in their lives.”
These same customers wanted their own individualized products, so Hangatu, as the sole employee of the business at the time, listened. “They really helped shape the business from being what was a male-focused cufflinks & accessories brand to what is now a very female-centric Apple Watch and accessories brand.”
The Shopify business caters to a mainly female clientele in Australia, the U.K., New Zealand, and the U.S., offering more than 500 premium bands made from silicone, leather, stainless steel, Milanese mesh, and nylon. Opening its doors in 2015, The Salty Fox has seen its fair share of ups and downs, starting in 2018 and 2019 when multiple competitors entered the field. Then 2020 hit.
“Nobody could get stock anywhere for a good, long time,” Hangatu says. “It sort of brought the business to a grinding halt for almost six months.”
As time ticked away, she decided to figure out how she could make The Salty Fox stand out from the competition. Turns out it was positive reviews. They had lots, which she added, along with additional photography, to her updated website. And her customers responded.
“Everyone was at home shopping, and we experienced the kind of crazy growth that you just could never expect. 200%, 400% year over year.”
Such crazy growth, while more than welcome, meant Hangatu had a hard time keeping up.
“The business was growing faster than what I could manage. This is where Cin7 comes in.”
Prior to implementing Cin7 in 2023 based on the advice of her accounting and bookkeeping team at Illumin8, Hangatu’s efforts to meet rising demand were getting her nowhere fast. Manual, spreadsheet-driven tracking prevented accurate stock visibility and “gut feel” decision-making for purchasing quantities and promotions led to tying up her limited capital in products that weren’t selling or missing out on those that were.
“I experienced huge issues with not being able to correctly predict how many units of any one SKU we needed. I had no idea what our landed cost was. I couldn’t explain to anyone who was doing our advertising on Google or Meta what our break-even point was,” she explains.
After a long discussion with the Illumin8 team, who knew firsthand the difficulties of managing the business’s expanding transaction volume manually in Xero, Hangatu says they suggested Cin7, the “gold standard for this service.”
She listened, but she admits. “There was a huge learning curve.”
That’s when Integration Kings, an Australian-based business systems consultancy providing cloud integration solutions for small and medium businesses, clocked in. And just in time, too.
“When we got Integration Kings on board, it allowed us to resolve a lot of the longstanding issues that we as a team didn’t have the skills to resolve ourselves and to get the most out of Cin7.”
Integration Kings helped them answer important questions regarding their landed costs and COGS, their monthly expenses, and which products are (and are not) profitable. “These are not questions I could answer before Cin7, and now we have a ton more visibility.”
In addition to helping them get answers as well as utilize all that Cin7 offers, Hangatu is grateful that Robert King, founder and owner of Integration Kings, was (and is) on hand to help train new employees on Cin7, ensuring they can use the powerful tool to its fullest potential.
“Even though Rob and his team are not employees of The Salty Fox, they’re an integral part of the team,” she says.
Robert feels the same way, and when he first joined the team, his initial “health check” on The Salty Fox revealed that Hangatu and her team had rock solid product management as an inventory business. There were, however, some things that needed to be optimized.
“The main part that was needing attention was the cost of the product so that they could actually get better reporting on how much it cost,” he says. “It was also just tightening up some of the workflows into the accounting side of things.”
Which they did, with Cin7.
Between the Cin7’s capabilities and Integration Kings’ expertise, The Salty Fox’s seasonal operations are running like clockwork. They now have centralized visibility to prevent stock conflicts with better awareness of what’s on hand and what’s incoming, the ability to do stock counts to find discrepancies, and a reduced risk of over-and-underselling and over buying.
“We used to overspend to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars every single year on stock. Cin7 has provided huge savings for us, and it allows us to be able to invest in other areas of the business,” Ellie says.
They also now have:
After 11 years in business, Hangatu is now confident in making data-based decisions, setting profitability goals, and investing her freed-up working capital into new stock and critical growth initiatives. She’s also excited that, as a mother of three young children, she can unplug every once in a while because her business is running on reliable systems and trained staff.
But perhaps the thing she’s most excited about? Getting to check off a big box on her wish list: warehousing her products in the U.S. so she can give her American customers the same fast delivery and customer service her Australian and New Zealand customers receive every day.
“I love Cin7. It’s saved us a ton of money, and it’s allowing us to integrate with the systems our U.S. 3PL uses. We couldn’t do this without Integration King’s support. We’d be in big trouble if Cin7 was turned off tomorrow.”