A record breaking Black Friday, without a hitch.

Muscle Nation hit a record 55,000 orders in one day during Black Friday 2020. All without missing a beat, thanks to some integration magic from Patchworks.

Company

Muscle Nation is one of Australia's leading and fastest-growing Activewear and Supplement Brands. A family orientated business based in Brisbane, Muscle Nation has created a community and culture like no other.⁣ They currently employ over 40 team members and ship to over 150 countries worldwide with continuous growth in all sectors.

Headquarters

Australia

Industry

Fitness Apparel

Apps integrated

“I honestly don’t know how we’d cope without Patchworks. We’ve never seen this level of support with a supplier before. They work out of hours to support us and are easily accessible to us through Slack. Patchworks are our integration experts”

Nathaniel Anthony
CEO & Owner at Muscle Nation

The challenge

Muscle Nation is an ecommerce success story. They launched from a tiny bedroom in 2016, before quickly moving to a 1,700sqm warehouse. And now they’ve even outgrown this space - so they’re building a state-of-the-art 4,000sqm warehouse.

That’s a lot of growth in 5 years.

But behind the scenes, problems bubbled up. Their warehouse and storefronts weren’t talking to each other. Some products were oversold. Some items were mispicked. High traffic launches caused inventory syncing issues.

The growth was massive. But their IT systems hadn’t scaled with that growth.

Uncontrollable growth

This uncontrollable growth caused problems:

Customers were left unhappy when they received the, ‘we’re sorry, your order is now out of stock’ email
Manual processes in the warehouse - from picking orders, to entering tracking information, were being overwhelmed by the rapid sales success
Overtime and new staff were needed just to keep up. Costs mounted, and profits reduced, as the old ways of working didn’t scale well.
And while staff loved being part of an Australian success story, they were sometimes left stressed and exhausted by the sheer workload coming through.

The solution

Muscle Nation quickly realised they needed a more efficient backend to handle the outstanding volume of sales coming through. Enter Patchworks.

We put our integration expertise into practice, and hooked up their Warehouse Management System (Peoplevox) with their storefront (Shopify Plus).

But this was more than a simple plug and play integration. We collaborated with the client to resolve complex issues around bundles, courier challenges and sales order processing.

With Patchworks’ help, Muscle Nation untangled the chaos behind the scenes.

Yet the true test came during Black Friday 2020.

Good news - the sales soared during Black Friday, and the integrations held up. A record-breaking 55,000 orders travelled through the integrations we built - all zinging along without a hitch.