About New Look

Montreal-based New Look Vision Group Inc. is Canada’s largest eyewear retailer. Recent acquisitions/partnerships have helped New Look establish a presence in the United States, as well, with hundreds of locations across both countries as of September 2023.

The Issues

As is so often the case with retailers achieving significant growth in their eCommerce business, New Look’s manual order fulfillment system was showing signs of strain. Automation was needed to reduce order-processing times, improve accuracy, increase efficiency and productivity, and, ultimately, lower operational costs.

Cyper, a digital transformation consultancy, was brought in to develop a feasible solution. They had multiple challenges to address:

• A complex system of data exchange existed between New Look’s website, built on the Magento 2 eCommerce platform, and the other elements of its digital ecosystem (CMS - Content Management System, ERP - Enterprise Resource Planning, POS - Point Of Sale).

• Any solution would need the flexibility to evolve and support New Look’s rapidly scaling business.

• Time was of the essence. The project needed to be completed as quickly as possible while also accounting for the education of New Look’s employees on the new order management system (OMS).

• Disruption of current business operations during integration was a non-starter - the transition had to be seamless.

The Process

Deeply experienced with helping existing companies become “digitally mature,” the Cyper team conducted a thorough audit of New Look’s eCommerce strategy and methods to formulate the best plan for both choosing the right solution and implementing it.

Through a series of workshops with New Look employees, they were able to discern and analyze:

• The sum total of New Look’s digital ecosystem elements and their technical characteristics.

• The integrations needed between those elements to enable an omnichannel customer experience.

• New Look’s product and data flow.

The Requirements

Based on the audit and workshops, New Look’s technical requirements for an OMS were determined to be:

• Integration with a Magento Community Edition-based eCommerce website and alignment with its full tech stack.

• Integration with multiple warehouses, an ERP system, and Canada Post (with the potential to expand to additional postal carriers)

• Full automation of the pick, pack, and ship process.

• Other integrations related to eCommerce and omnichannel enablement.

Further workshops addressed other requirements for New Look. Assessments re: implementation, internal support, sustainability, and budget found that the chosen OMS needed to:

• Be out-of-the-box, customizable, and reasonably priced.

• Provide clients with different payment plans and options.

• Have pricing not based on online revenue.

• Allow independence from the solution provider.

The Solution

Based on all the criteria listed above, the development team researched several OMS options and came to a definitive conclusion. 

Only one system checked all the boxes: SkuNexus. 

In addition to all the features already mentioned, Cyper President Elena Pomazanova had this to say about SkuNexus:

• It’s a simple, clean, “best-of-breed” headless solution with “straightforward UI/UX.”

• Because SkuNexus is platform-agnostic, Cyper didn’t need to write anything from scratch.

• Native integration with Magento 2 means that it’s easy for New Look to support the solution (with PHP devs in place).

• The modular quality of SkuNexus code was akin to “working with legos,” i.e. including or removing functionality was simple and made customization more efficient.

• Being that SkuNexus supports multichannel and can be extensively customized, it can grow as the company grows.

Beyond the ease-of-use elements, developers found SkuNexus support and service to be equally compelling. Answers to questions and updates to core functionality were always delivered extremely quickly.

The Results

Cyper’s exceptional research, diligent work, and customer-centric focus yielded many positive outcomes:

• New Look had the deep information to make an informed decision and choose SkuNexus to fit all of their needs.

• Cyper’s team was able to meet New Look’s time constraints and complete the entire project, from initial analysis to go-live, in nine months.

• To educate New Look employees, Cyper prepared detailed tech specifications and provided descriptions of all steps, code, integration instructions, technical requirements, and server configuration details.

New Look, in turn: 

• Increased online sales. 

• Significantly improved its pick, pack, and ship process.

• Has an OMS with the flexibility to expand as needed as it scales going forward.

The New Look/Cyper/SkuNexus project is a great example of what can happen when people believe in the quality of products, power of creativity, and clarity of vision.