When There Was No More Space in the Room
Our story begins in Ramesh Delsouz’ childhood room some summers ago. Here we find Ramesh sitting on his laptop in the middle of purchasing a slick new pair of Adidas Ultra Boost shoes for the price of 500 DKK. Yet, in spite of being very satisfied with his deal, and after having made his schoolmates dizzy on the football field in his shoes, Ramesh decides to put them up for sale due to their popularity.
It proves to be a profitable idea.
The shoes are namely sold for 1300 DKK, and the profit gives Ramesh the taste for more. And before he could finish the phrase “Adidas Ultra Boost,” the pile of shoe boxes underneath his bed grows like a stack of pancakes during the morning hours at a diner. As this happens, sweet business dreams start to develop on top of the bed.
This is where our story takes a decisive turn as Ramesh’s big brother, Qais, walks into the frame, i.e. both the one carved into the wall of the room and the shoe sale operation. Because with Qais’ help, the two siblings start to expand the space, the assortment and the ambitions.
Following this, the brothers register their company name, DelsouX, and create a webshop from which they sell pre-owned shoes, clothing and accessories by both high-end and streetwear brands. As the products start to pour in, the brothers realize that they need to rent a warehouse in order to accommodate the demand. They also see that they need more structure if they want to make their workflows efficient, as Qais explains:
“We suddenly received too many incoming goods to keep up with all the processes we were able to handle earlier. You have to consider the fact that we have a lot of “unique products,” which means that we receive 1 of each individual item, that we have to process and calculate the estimated profits for. So we need a system that can tell us these things right away. If we simply write our data down on a piece of paper, our business risks becoming disorganized. We must therefore begin to structure and organize.”
And so our two enterprising brothers go out on a search for a system that can systematize their workflows and give their business wings to fly. However, few people find the holy grail in their first go-around…
Slow Start in Excel
It might be an overstatement to call Excel the root of all evil. But it is quite often the source of some stress and strife. Even though Qais knew Excel very well from his classrooms, he starts to realize that the “Excel Solution” isn’t the best option for him:
“We started out with what we call the “Excel Solution.” It just amounts to a lot of manual work and it becomes difficult for us to manage all of our products in it. It is hard work for us to search for a specific item because we have a lot of data. Simply put: Excel starts to slow us down. So we need to find a new solution.”
This alternative solution dumps right into their laps shortly after, approximately a year and a half ago. While Qais is surfing on Facebook, a rarity pops up on his feed. He stumbles upon an appetizing and appealing ad – which could be compared to finding Bigfoot in your backyard. Qais describes the event like this:
“We found Rackbeat – pretty much by chance – through a Facebook advertisement. I downloaded their e-book, read it and found it quite interesting. Especially since we recently build a webshop in Shopify. But, we realized that it made perfect sense to look into an inventory management system.”
Now, every child must learn how to crawl before you can send it out for groceries. Similarly, all new systems require a period in which you get used to their functions. Qais had to face this fact as well:
“Sure, it is a bit of a task at the beginning when you don’t know the system. But it seemed like we would get there fairly quickly. We knew it would be somewhat of a challenge; however, we would pass every possible bump in the road until we found the best way to make it work.”
But, how did the guys from DelsouX make their new Rackbeat home a nice and comfortable workspace, you might ask?
The Dreams Start to Look Real
Even though Rackbeat is an, almost, autonomous inventory management software, a large part of the secret to the system’s user-friendly nature lies in solid customer service. All well-oiled machines are operated by, for a little while at least, real human beings of flesh and blood who can guide the users through the bumps in the road. We will spare you from a rain of shameless praise heaped on our own colleagues and instead let Qais do the talking:
“It is one of the best supports I have ever had. I don’t think that I have had a similar experience. You meet a person who actually tries to find the best solution for you. I was also at a meeting with Rackbeat. They literally spent an hour – and some extra time afterward, helping us and answering my questions regarding our Shopify integration. And we went through all stages of it.”
This interplay with Shopify is fairly crucial for the business. And, fortunately, Qais realizes that Rackbeat harmonizes with his webshop and economic system, Dinero, like an orchestra that has played with each other their entire lives:
“The cool thing about Rackbeat is this: We have a webshop, we have Rackbeat and then we have our economic system. Rackbeat is placed in the middle and is a skilled operator. We work from Rackbeat since it has all the integrations to the other systems. This makes our work very intuitive and easy. Rackbeat interacts with the other software, so we don’t need to perform all these manual transactions. It saves us a lot of time.”
Aside from connecting their business and making the workflows much smoother, Rackbeat has also helped DelsouX process a lot more products and, thereby, sell far more items than before: “We started with 200 products, and when I look at our Rackbeat dashboard, I can see that we have 1015-1020 products today.” Furthermore, Rackbeat has even reduced the time we spend on processing orders in half: “Before we had Rackbeat, we spent about 20 minutes handling an order. Now, we only use 5 to 10 minutes.”
And most importantly: The manual processes, bookkeeping chaos and Excel battles are now part of a finished chapter for DelsouX:
“When we used Excel, we constantly had to go and look through all our messages, information and products. Today, these things are right there in front of us! Rackbeat really removes a heavy workload from our shoulders. We are much more efficient now because we don’t even have to think about bookkeeping. We know that it happens automatically in the backend. We have all of our data stored in Rackbeat – and we feel really safe about it.”
So, when DelsouX point their binoculars toward the horizon, what meets their gaze is a bright future in which the dreams from the childhood room don’t feel like a fantasy. Since the brothers embarked on their business venture, they have seen tremendous growth and packed many warehouse shelves. This is why they look to open a physical store and become no less than “Denmark’s biggest pre-owned shop with clothes, accessories and sneakers.”
And Rackbeat is more than ready to give the shop, point-of-sales and customers a warm welcome alongside DelsouX.
*DelsouX is not affiliated with brands sold or depicted.