GOOD AMERICAN: From Million-Dollar Launches to Driving Sales with Automatic Product Tagging & Inventory Flags

When you do $1 million in sales on day one ... The expectations for future growth are heightened. Especially if you're Khloé Kardashian, co-founder of GOOD AMERICAN, a denim-focused fashion brand designed for a curvier, sexier, and stronger shape. To maintain GOOD AMERICAN’s accelerated growth, Kardashian and her team needed to put much of the business on autopilot. Today, they’re revealing exactly how they automated a host of tedious, manual, backend processes … so that you can do the same.

It started with a problem …

“There’s something missing from the denim community,” Khloé Kardashian says. “Whenever I buy new jeans it’s hard to find a pair that fits my body type and even when I do, they always need alterations. I knew if I had this problem, there must be tons of other girls who do too.”

And it turned into a denim-world revolution.

Instead of forcing women to fit into one-size-fits-all type jeans, why not create jeans that fit and flatter every shape and size?

So, Kardashian teamed up with renowned celebrity branding expert Emma Grede to co-found GOOD AMERICAN, a denim-focused fashion brand designed for a curvier, sexier, and stronger shape.

Rather than offer a separate plus-size line — as many in the industry do — GOOD AMERICAN prides itself on being all-inclusive and offers jeans and other fashions in sizes 00-24. In Grede’s words:

We believe everyone deserves to be shown off. Fashion should be made to fit women, not the other way around.

With minimal stitching, extra shape in the hips, and a contour waistband that stretches to act like a belt to avoid a gap in the back, GOOD AMERICAN is creating jeans that fit and flatter all body types.

It was a gap in the market long overdue for filling. But just as GOOD AMERICAN was beginning to reshape the world of fashion …

The Biggest Launch in Denim History

That’s how GOOD AMERICAN describes its one-million-dollar launch in October 2016. As Kardashian puts it:

I'm so happy with the success we have had in the last month, but we have so far to go. This is only the beginning. When people try the jeans they fall in love.

With luxury jeans powering their launch, the brand has since expanded its product line to include sweats, bodysuits, and jackets. Importantly, GOOD AMERICAN also gives customers a reason to come back and shop every week.

“We target to drop a new product, style or category every Thursday,” Mehmet Dokumcu, Head of Digital & E-Commerce, says. “That’s our cadence and it allows us to always have something new for the customer rather than the traditional fashion seasons.”

It’s certainly a recipe for hypergrowth.

But with that growth comes complexity that can bog down productivity and efficiency.

You see, when you do one-million dollars in sales on launch day, the expectations for future growth get heightened. Now add to that a fast-growing SKU count and lofty growth targets, and the task of managing GOOD AMERICAN’s store becomes more complex and laborious.

In fact, the more the product catalog expands, the more time the GOOD AMERICAN team spends on two repetitive tasks enriching product information prior to publishing and dynamically updating inventory flags such as low stock or sold out.

Initially, just two choices existed to alleviate that manual process. The GOOD AMERICAN team could (1) custom code a solution into their Shopify store or (2) integrate a custom solution with the company’s backend (i.e., ERP and 3PL)

Both options would require development resources and cost the company time and money it would rather invest in more important ROI-generating activities.

Fortunately, a third option now exists… one in which the GOOD AMERICAN team can put laborious manual tasks on autopilot with just a few clicks.

Underneath the Automation Hood

To eliminate the growing number of repetitive tasks taking more of his team’s time, the GOOD AMERICAN team recently began using Shopify Flow, an automation platform that allows Shopify merchants to create backend business workflows and simplify processes so his team can focus on higher-value tasks that drive sales.

In the case of GOOD AMERICAN, Dokumcu and his team have created nine workflow automations including the following two:

Workflow #1: Inventory Publishing Automation

If a product sells out, Shopify Flow automatically tags the product as “Out of Stock” and publishes that information to GOOD AMERICAN’s site in real time. If a product’s count dips below the set threshold, Flow tags the product as “Low Stock” which injects urgency and lifts sales.

“It’s an extra incentive or nudge to buy when customers see we’re running low on a product,” Dokumcu says. “If we’re out of stock it also gives shoppers an opportunity to sign up to be notified when the product is back in stock which results in future sales we otherwise might miss.”

Workflow #2: Tagging & Filtering Automation

When a product is created in GOOD AMERICAN’s backend system and passed to Shopify via the integration the team has built, Flow steps in. Based on set criteria, the tool automatically assigns the tags necessary to enrich the product for filters, collections, and site search.

More specifically, the product information in the company’s backend system — ERP integration — does not always contain values that are customer friendly and needs to be enriched prior to publishing on the site.

For example, “Good Legs” is a product type attribute GOOD AMERICAN uses to describe its high-rise skinny jeans internally, but the term “Good Legs” doesn’t necessarily communicate that to customers.

So each product must be enriched with web-specific attributes before it can be published on the GOOD AMERICAN site so the product terminology makes sense to customers who can then search and filter each product or collection using terminology relevant to them.

All “Good Legs” products are now automatically tagged as “high rise skinny jeans” which is the terminology customers use to filter or sort through collections.

Dokumcu explains:

“If a shopper is searching for skinny jeans, as a result of how Flow has automatically tagged the products based on the rules set by us, the skinny jeans are filterable by wash type.”

“Wash is specific to denim, so if a customer is shopping for sweats or bodysuits instead, Flow recognizes this and assigns those products a color filter option instead of wash.”

The GOOD AMERICAN team was able to use Flow to create automated workflows themselves in less than a day. Even with significant growth already, they’ve set aggressive sales targets for 2018 and expect future growth to be fueled, in part, by efficiency gains attributed to automation.

We’re really excited about Shopify Flow not only because it saves us time and money but also because it allows us to focus on strategic initiatives that will move the needle instead of manual data entry tasks.

Mehmet Dokumcu, GOOD AMERICAN

You can access, download, and put 14 workflows into action for your here at our article on making ecommerce automation software simple.

The Future of Automation

The GOOD AMERICAN team has been using approximately a dozen apps to fill important operational tasks. However, now they are using Flow to do several of the chores those apps used to do.

“We’re using Flow to replace apps,” Dokumcu says. “For me, it’s great being able to consolidate the number of apps we use because it means fewer third-party solutions in the mix.”

Importantly, automated workflows that are triggered only after specific conditions reduce the risk of data entry errors. It’s yet another reason Dokumcu and his team are identifying additional manual repetitive processes that may be automated in the future.

“We’re excited to see how much more we can do with Flow, especially as it continues to evolve,” Dokumcu says. “On other platforms, every time you need to do something — like create custom workflows — you have to build them from scratch. So to have a user-friendly app like Flow that allows us to start doing much of this ourselves is very encouraging.”