The Challenge
Marshall Home is a $10M+ wholesale company with six product lines: Marshall Home & Garden, Banyan Designs, Paige Danielle, Alexandria Lamps, Annaleece, and PatioLite. An admin team of five ran all of them. Each brand had its own website, and behind them sat five separate databases in the ERP that talked to none of them.
Three of the six lines were barely online at all: customers browsed a PDF catalog and phoned in their orders. Fulfillment ran on printed paperwork passed between departments, and because inventory and customer data never synced, staff spent their days re-keying orders and answering calls from customers who had no other way to check stock or track a shipment.
One order took five people and about ten steps. A customer called in and someone took the order by hand and printed it. It was walked to a second desk to have shipping calculated, and the customer was called back to approve the cost. It went to the Controller, who called the warehouse, and someone walked up front to collect it. The order was picked from memory, walked back to the office, corrected to match whatever was actually in stock, charged, and printed again. Then it sat on a desk until someone from shipping collected it later in the day.
The mandate from ownership was plain: a simpler system for processing orders, a modern web experience, technology answering the complaints customers actually had, and more revenue.
Just as much was off the table. The ERP stayed. The phones stayed too, because the small-town relationship was the business; the web store had to read as another way to reach them, never a replacement. Each brand kept its own URL and its own identity inside the shared shop. The team needed training on everything new. And the cutover had to be fast, because running two systems side by side costs money every day it lasts.