How Southern Tide Grew Its B2B Retailers by 71% in One Year

The Results Southern Tide Saw

After integrating RepSpark’s software platform into its operations, Southern Tide was able to automate manual processes; increase productivity and efficiency; and simplify their ordering process. 

The move to a digital platform also empowered the company, and its reps, with data insights on their customer buying habits, which allowed them to better personalize their customer buying experience. 

These improvements, alongside others, led to these improvements in the first year working with RepSpark: 

• 71% Growth in B2B users 
• 88% Increase in B2B order volume 

“We evaluated a lot of different competitors, but they did not have the digital capabilities and embroidery functionality down,” said Heather Parramore, Ecommerce Manager at Southern Tide. “With the RepSpark platform, we’ve increased our retailer orders from both our sales team and retail partners-- our customers love it, our sales team love it, and it has transformed our approach to selling.” 

The Challenges Southern Tide Faced

Southern Tide came to RepSpark with various cumbersome manual processes that its team wanted to automate, along with a desire to modernize and digitize crucial parts of its operations. 

The Two Requests Southern Tide Had

Automating Manual Processes

Before working with RepSpark, embroidery orders were a manual process for Southern Tide. Their team manually entered orders, one by one on an excel sheet.  

Over 80% of their time was spent on manual order processes, from getting information from the sales rep, to inputting the orders into multiple systems. 

Although Southern Tide was using an ERP system, their team had no visibility into inventory in real-time, and relaying that information to the sales team was only possible through a dedicated account manager who was updating the information manually and emailing the sales team back and forth. 

RepSpark’s platform was able to sync with Southern tide’s ERP system to provide a live view of the company’s inventory. 

This gave their sales reps a new level of visibility that allowed them to easily create assortments to send to their customers without unnecessary back and forths they previously had, reclaiming that valuable time they were previously losing. 

Digitizing Operations

With the increase of omnichannel selling, Southern Tide needed a tool that could be used during, and post,  pandemic, as well as at in-person trade shows. The team at Southern Tide needed digital tools to help elevate their brand from wherever they were with real-time data. 

On the RepSpark platform, Southern Tide has been able to personalize their buying experience for their retailers through shoppable digital catalogs, custom assortments, incorporating high definition images and video into their platform.

The digital capabilities they’ve gained have allowed Southern Tide to be faster to present, streamlining the ordering process while personalizing the experience at the same time. 

“We’ve gotten better at producing shoppable digital catalogs making it easier for our retailers to shop and for us to update and add new products each season,” said Parramore.

Another benefit of moving to a digital platform was the newfound data that Southern Tide found themselves with access to. With RepSpark’s data insights, Southern Tide was able to learn more about their customer’s buying journey and use the feedback to promote their product line more effectively. 

RepSpark’s Event Microsites have also been a big benefit for Southern Tide and have allowed the company to create custom pop-up events like tournament events, and club events with their retailers.