Case study: $0 to $3M in under a year

from brick & mortar to
omni-channel

GTR Leather is a leading California based manufacturer that specializes in upholstered furniture. They turned to Bear to build a dependable and scalable online revenue channel.

With over 40 years of experience in manufacturing and plants in the United States, Mexico, and China, GTR Leather has become one of the most well respected brands in the furniture upholstery industry. They’ve built their reputation on producing superior products at tremendous value.

Challenge
GTR Leather wanted to diversify their revenue channel and expand into the rapidly growing online selling environment in a way that made sense for their business. Having been focused historically on servicing top 100 and independent brick and mortar retailers coast to coast, GTR founders Christopher and Peter decided that it was time to find a technology partner that could offer frictionless setup and scalability with major online retailers and marketplaces like Wayfair.com, Overstock.com, Houzz.com, and Amazon.com, while helping them ensure the day-to-day operations of their multichannel ecommerce was effortless and fully integrated.

Having dipped their toes in ecommerce in the past, GTR Leather was well aware of how complicated and time consuming it is to manually create and deploy hundreds of data points for product listings, keep track of inventory across all channels, and pull the right growth levers at the right time. They had seen too many other furniture manufacturers adopt an unsuccessful “set it and forget it” approach to diversified online revenue.

“What stood out to us was Bear’s focus on the details. Everything was built out in a way that made sense for our company.”

Christopher Thorpe and Peter Robinson, co-founders
GTR Leather and Eleanor Rigby Home

Solution
‍GTR Leather turned to CommerceBear to provide the superpowers needed to launch and manage their catalog across a number of leading online home goods channels. After meeting at High Point Market, they chose Bear for the company's reputation of excellent customer support, reliability, and proven technology built specifically for the unique requirements of furniture manufacturers and wholesalers. Bear's extensive relationships and integrations with key online channels made it easy for GTR Leather to expand onto channels with millions of new customers and also grow their onsite product assortment. Moreover, Bear's multichannel publishing and automated inventory offerings made it painless for GTR Leather to grow their reach, add new SKUs, and easily manage product quantities across multiple warehouses in California, Mexico, and North Carolina.

Results
‍By partnering with Bear, GTR Leather has been able to establish and ramp an enviable and profitable online revenue channel within a very short period of time. The scalability of working within the Bear ecosystem allows GTR Leather to grow their business and drive new revenue in a highly cost effective manner. GTR Leather’s ownership has already started adding new product lines and explore other furniture verticals to ramp with Bear. The results have been tremendous, surpassing $1m net-new GMV within the first 11 months on the Bear platform.

Eleanor Rigby Home expansion
Following tremendous success in year one, Eleanor Rigby Home (GTR Leather's higher-end "fine furniture" sister brand) joined Bear to scale multichannel. ERH has a deep catalog of custom frames, leathers, and finishes spanning well over 30,000 unique custom skus. In order to support the expansion, GTR & ERH expanded production across 2 new plants in Mexico and distribution centers in California and North Carolina.
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To learn more about what GTR Leather and ERH built with Bear, please get in touch with us✨

“We wanted a partner who was invested from the start and didn’t just take money up front. For small companies like us, everyone needs to have skin in the game.”

Christopher Thorpe and Peter Robinson, co-founders
GTR Leather and Eleanor Rigby Home

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