Lilla P.'s Inventory Visibility Drives 40% Annual Growth

May 2013 Integrated Solutions For Retailers

By Bob Johns, associate editor

Specialty apparel retailer Lilla P. has doubled in size over the past three years through a complete systems overhaul and inventory integration.

Lilla P. needed to make a change. The casual fashion retailer was growing at a rapid pace, but its systems were not keeping up. The company had launched an e-commerce site in addition to its growing wholesale business, but the inventory database was not keeping up. “With the size and number of transactions going through our database, it kept crashing and becoming corrupt,” says Thomas Nakios, president of Lilla P. “We had to rebuild it two or three times a week, which really slowed us down.”

Lilla P. is a casual-classic fashion line catering primarily to 30-to-40-year-old women. The company was founded 15 years ago by Nakios’ wife Pauline before they were married. In 2001 Pauline moved to New York, and they decided to really make a go of the company. Nakios was working for a large real estate investment manager at the time and decided to take over operations for the company and begin the process of reaching profitability. By 2006, the company was doing well enough to allow Nakios to leave his financial job to work with Lilla P. full time. This was the same time that he decided it was time to upgrade the company systems.