When the pandemic hit, the iconic US footwear and apparel brand Johnston & Murphy started using NuORDER by Lightspeed to improve how they communicated with their accounts. Today the wholesale platform’s Whiteboarding feature sits at the heart of some of their most integral sales and marketing operations. Sales uses it to put together suggested buys for key accounts while Marketing uses Whiteboards to power their catalog creation process.
Behind the Brand: Johnston & Murphy
Johnston & Murphy’s start as an iconic footwear brand began over 170 years ago, launching a tradition of custom-designing shoes for U.S. presidents throughout the decades. Today, the fashion brand is celebrated for its premium footwear, apparel, and accessories.
The Opportunity
Find an effective and efficient way to share assortments with buyers
As a long-established fashion brand, Johnston & Murphy has valuable relationships with many enterprise retailers. And some of those retailers still prefer traditional ways of doing business, including requesting physical, print copies of wholesale catalogs. Johnston & Murphy needed to find an effective and efficient way to continue to satisfy this request and to encourage buyers to engage with marketing assets and lookbooks — without incurring the burden of print costs, shipping delays, lost mail, and paper waste.
The Solution
Use Whiteboards to create compelling catalogs and custom lists
What is NuORDER Whiteboards?
Whiteboards is a feature that makes it faster and easier to create marketing assets and collaborate online. Brands use it to share compelling product and collection stories and merchandising suggestions with buyers. They often include product and editorial images, text (such as product data, prices, and SKUs), logos, and more in these visually-engaging presentations. What’s more, you don’t need Photoshop skills to use Whiteboards — it makes it fast and easy for any team member to add, arrange, or remove images and text.
Create catalogs
Johnston & Murphy realized they could use NuORDER Whiteboards to easily replicate their traditional wholesale catalogs and mail printed versions to key accounts that prefer a physical copy.
Johnston & Murphy also effectively uses Whiteboards to launch the pagination process for their direct-to-consumer catalog by laying out the product assortment for each page. Because Whiteboards have pages, it’s really easy to use this feature to mimic a print catalog. What’s more, since all of their styles are in NuORDER, they can pull all the images, SKUs, and product data they need in one place. Once they’ve finished building out the catalog, they share it with their creative agency to begin the catalog development process.
“In addition to including our wholesale assortment in NuORDER, we also include our retail products, so we don’t view NuORDER solely as a wholesale tool.”
— Kim Hammond, Senior Marketing Manager, Johnston & Murphy
Create custom lists
The Johnston & Murphy team understands the power of creating custom lists — curated assortments of recommended buys — for their key accounts. When brands create and share custom lists, they improve the buying experience for their closest wholesale partners by helping them save time, access helpful insights and ideas at a glance, and plan or place orders more efficiently.
For example, the brand uses Whiteboards to put together visually-enticing assortments of suggested buys for one of their largest accounts, a long-established, nationwide department store. They use personalized custom lists that offer their key customer a comprehensive overview of key merchandising recommendations and speed up the buying process by helping them understand which SKUs are appropriate for which stores.
The nationwide department store often buys specific SKUs to be sold in specific doors, while at other times, they’ll buy specific SKUs with the intention of selling them in every one of their locations. Johnston & Murphy elevates and streamlines the buying process for this highly-valued retailer by giving them extra visibility and valuable merchandising suggestions at a glance.
The Result
Johnston & Murphy has added value to its retailer partnerships and created improved sales and marketing efficiencies thanks to their savvy use of NuORDER’s Whiteboard feature to create both custom lists and catalogs.
Discover how you can elevate your storytelling and speed up the buying process with NuORDER Whiteboard.
