From Cozy Robes to Clean Workflows: Accessible Luxury Meets Its Match in Altura Innovation

Softies spent four years battling broken NetSuite processes, broken Shopify connections, and failed integrations. Then they partnered with Altura Innovation, and everything changed.

Softies, a luxury loungewear brand beloved by customers and Oprah’s Favorite Things list, started like many fast-growing e-commerce companies, running QuickBooks for accounting and Shopify for online sales. As the business scaled, the limitations became clear. To support their growth, they invested in NetSuite in 2020, aiming to streamline operations and financials while continuing to use Shopify for ecommerce.

However, despite the promise of a unified system, Softies spent years battling broken NetSuite processes, unreliable Shopify order automation, and unresolved integration issues. The full potential of their investment remained out of reach until they found a true partner in Altura Innovation.

For a company growing as quickly as Softies, a reliable Shopify to NetSuite connection was not optional; it was essential. A well-built integration could automate the work of ten employees, reducing manual order entry and keeping operations running smoothly. But getting it right would take more than just the right platform. It would take the right partner.

To maintain the integration, Softies initially worked with a well known offshore Celigo partner. But as the business scaled, recurring issues with the system weren’t being resolved quickly enough, leading to disruptions in key processes. Softies spent several years struggling with unresolved integration issues. “We migrated to NetSuite in 2020. By 2023, things were still broken,” says Softies CEO Tim Murphy. “It wasn’t until we found Altura that it finally got better, fast.”

Recognizing the need for more responsive, hands-on support, Softies got introduced to Altura Innovation, Celigo’s New Partner of the Year, as a better fit for the level of service and expertise their growing operations required.

Softies knew they needed action, not another long discovery process. Altura’s Quickstart engagement offered a low-risk, high-velocity path forward, focusing on their biggest issues within weeks. It gave Softies the confidence to move fast and see real, measurable gains where they had once felt stuck.

With Altura’s help, Celigo transformed from a frustrating tool into a business-critical system that Softies cannot live without. “If Celigo were pulled out tomorrow, it would cripple our operations,” says Murphy. Controller Kathryn Strang agrees, adding that it would take at least ten additional staff members to manually process orders and accounting without it. “It is not just helpful; it is essential to keeping our business running efficiently.”

After their introductory call, Softies immediately signed on for a Quickstart engagement focused on Amazon flows. Working with Altura on a single project unlocked clarity the team had not seen in years and built the trust that soon led to a full AlturaCare partnership.

“Even when something could not be solved immediately, Altura always explained the reason clearly and transparently. That level of openness was a first for us,” says Kathryn Strang, Softies Controller. The clarity built real trust, and soon after, Softies committed fully by signing on for AlturaCare, Altura Innovation’s complete application management services program.

From real-time ticket resolution to hands-on warehouse visits, the AlturaCare partnership felt less like a vendor agreement and more like an extension of the Softies team. Altura quickly resolved long-standing NetSuite and Celigo issues, implemented a ticketing system with full visibility and rapid response workflows, and helped Softies clear four years of operational roadblocks in just a few weeks.

“I wish we’d partnered with Altura from the start,” says Murphy.

With the roadblocks finally cleared, Softies’ operational strength took center stage. Their relentless focus on collaboration, customer experience, and operational excellence had already set them apart. During the holiday season, before engaging Altura, their warehouse team processed over 3,000 orders in a single day from a single location, even without full automation. Altura’s role was to unleash the strength of a team that was already built to win, removing friction, enabling greater automation, and giving Softies the foundation to scale even further.

Altura’s unique approach to partnership allows their clients to define the rules of engagement. For Softies, that meant not just solving problems for them, but training their internal staff. “We appreciate Altura training up our employees to fix the things they can fix, and not just grabbing consulting hours for the sake of grabbing them,” says Murphy.

The tech stack stopped being the bottleneck and started being the foundation for growth. Altura turned years of friction into forward momentum. With hands-on strategy, embedded support, and a true partnership model, Softies now runs confidently across platforms without needing an internal IT department.

“Now we can say yes to new channels, new partners, new opportunities, all because the systems are ready for it,” says Strang. “It finally feels like the business and the backend are working together. With Altura as our partner, we see no limit to the channels we can add or the volume we can handle.”

Today, Softies is positioned to build on its reputation as a leader in accessible luxury, with operations as smooth and elegant as the products they deliver. With a tech foundation they can trust, the Softies team can focus fully on innovation, expansion, and continuing to delight customers across every channel.

THE IMPACT

✔ 99%+ automation uptime across Shopify, NetSuite, and Celigo

✔ Ticket resolution within hours, not weeks

✔ 24/7 ticketing visibility and same-day resolutions

✔ Zero internal IT headcount required

✔ Full confidence to scale into new channels

✔ Morale boost across ops and warehouse teams

Altura Innovation is a Celigo Premier Partner specializing in e-commerce, retail, and NetSuite enablement.

Softies is a leading innovator in luxury loungewear, combining exceptional products with a world-class customer experience across both B2C and wholesale channels.

Visit Altura Innovation →

Buy Pajamas from Softies →

Big News for NetSuite Optimization and Integration

Today, I introduce you to Altura Innovation, your technology partner in the NetSuite ecosystem.

Our Mission

To bridge the gap between unmet needs and the transformative potential of fully optimized technology solutions. By leveraging cutting-edge technology such as AI, automation, and NetSuite ERP, we enhance and elevate capabilities in e-commerce, retail, distribution, manufacturing, and field service.

Altura Innovation is unlike any other NetSuite or Celigo Consulting firm. We accept a limited number of clients at any one time, devoting all our efforts to your business and treating it as if it were our own.  In other words, we aren’t an ERP Consulting company; we are a strategic advisor focused on aligning people, process, and technology to be a growth multiplier for our clients.

Altura Innovation’s deep learning gained through leading companies in product management, engineering, delivery, sales and marketing makes us the most technically proficient problem solver in the NetSuite ecosystem and positions us as the perfect partner to support your success.

NetSuite Services

• Implementation: Ask any business that has implemented NetSuite—even those who recommend NetSuite Professional Services for their excellent implementation packages—you’ll often hear how invaluable it would have been to have a trusted advisor to help navigate the transition from their existing accounting system to NetSuite. Altura Innovation enables business process owners to harness their knowledge into a more effective design, avoiding the pitfalls of a convoluted system setup.  

• Support and Optimization: If your business process owners are complaining that you've taken a step backwards or the old system was better than the new way, your system isn’t optimized. The solution is closer than you think. Instead of causing your team to rage against IT-driven changes, we can help you automate and they will fall in love with the technology supporting your vision.  We are also experts at documentation and training. That seems like it should be table stakes, but it’s generally an afterthought for most NetSuite consulting firms.

• Project Recovery & Rescue: It’s very frustrating as a leadership team to learn that your ERP implementation is out of budget with no light at the end of the tunnel. We can quickly assess your project and offer you a clear, crisp, no-bulls**t path to getting the outcomes you expected from your technology transformation project.

• Field Service Management Expertise: As a field service micro vertical thought leader, I have over 8 years of experience supporting over a hundred implementations. I recognize that the team in the field is the foundation for everything service organizations do for their customers. Altura Innovation can help you ensure your technology transformation is seamlessly adopted.

Integration Services

• NetSuite Integrations: We are experts at harmonizing the data between NetSuite and your other systems. We have experienced full-stack developers and Celigo Integration Engineers that can deliver rapid solutions. We meticulously document the flow of data and build robust integrations. In other words, you can maintain it yourselves instead of having to call for support because of a fragile design and non-existent exception handling.

Data Services

• Business Intelligence (BI): We help you leverage your data to drive actionable insights and improve strategic decision-making.

Are you ready?  Visit us at www.alturainnovation.com

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The 3 most common ERP performance failures

These are the top 3 performance failures NetSuite customers make and what you can do about them.

Tailoring the robust NetSuite ERP to fit your specific requirements promises enhanced efficiency and a competitive edge by automating manual steps incorporation validations, and integrating your business systems like Shopify, Salesforce, BigCommerce with Celigo. To ensure your NetSuite environment thrives, do these 3 things.

1. Beware of Poorly Written Scripting and Customizations

The power of NetSuite lies in its flexibility, including the tremendously powerful use of scripts, such as programmatically updating a Sales Order Record while it's saving with value added information. However, this flexibility can be a double-edged sword. It's common for so many use cases to be added, that the scripts become bloated and sap the performance from your system. Loading many scripts/workflow is less efficient than using one per request type. Combine them and eliminate anything that doesn't add value. Requests that don't need to be synchronous on order save should be moved to MapReduce scripts.

2. Avoid Poor Integration Design and Performance

Integrating NetSuite with other systems is a common practice for expanding its capabilities and ensuring seamless data flow across your business ecosystem. Integrations that are not thoughtfully designed, considering data volume, sync frequency, and error handling, can lead to poor performance, and reliability issues. Use event based integrations where there is a performance need, and state based where near real time will do. Consider using an iPaaS software like my favorite Celigo to make it much easier to get a performant solution that checks all of the boxes.

3. Do Not Underestimate the Importance of Proper Data Management

An often overlooked aspect of NetSuite customization is the strategic management of data within the system. Having a thousand custom fields in the system with drop down lists that have an insane number of choices will sink your performance. Inadequate data management practices, such as creation of unnecessary records, failing to archive old data or not maintaining data integrity across records, can significantly slow down your NetSuite environment. Efficient data management ensures that your system can quickly access and process the information it needs, without being bogged down by irrelevant or outdated data. Thoughtful design of the data structure, regular data audits, and the use of data archiving or purging mechanisms are essential steps in maintaining a high-performing NetSuite system.

If you are already experiencing system performance or Integration pain in your NetSuite environment, you can improve it with tips like what I shared above or grab time with me to review your tech stack.

Together, we can review your system, identify potential improvements, and unlock the full potential of your NetSuite investment.

Top 3 tradeoffs for choosing the cheap quote

The 3 tradeoffs that come from choosing a cheap quote on your implementation, from Intuit QuickBooks to NetSuite.

Expertise and Experience: The most affordable option may not bring the depth of knowledge required for a seamless transition. A skilled provider with a proven track record in your industry understands the nuances of your business processes, ensuring a custom fit for your needs.

Long-Term Support and Scalability: Initial implementation is just the beginning. A quality provider stands by your side, offering ongoing support, training, and scalability solutions. They're an investment in your future, helping you to adapt and grow without the need for costly reimplementation.

Comprehensive Solutions Over Quick Fixes: A lower-cost provider might cut corners, focusing on a quick launch rather than a comprehensive, strategic implementation. This can lead to issues down the line that are far more expensive to resolve. A reputable partner ensures that NetSuite not only goes live but thrives as an integral part of your business ecosystem.

One of the first decisions you'll face as a team is whether to jump in for a quick win of "Financials First" or "SuiteSuccess" or do you set your sights on a much bigger impact up front. Get clear on what Minimal Valuable Transformation looks like for your team, and execute on it.

Remember... when it comes to your business... people are more important than process, and process is more important than technology. Outline what you must have in your first iteration, and then stop at nothing to get to value as quickly as possible product.

Choosing Wisely

Your NetSuite implementation partner shapes your platform's success. Opting for value over cost means investing in a partnership that understands your business, offers tailored solutions, and supports your growth every step of the way.

Grab a time to chat about your tech stack and your move to NetSuite.

Top 5 benefits of integrating ecommerce & NetSuite

These are the top 5 ways integrating your BigCommerce or Shopify, ecommerce Store to NetSuite will transform your Operations and Accounting.

1. Orders placed on your website will be automatically imported into NetSuite. Products that are dropped shipped from vendors will have the Purchase Orders automatically created and sent to the preferred vendor. As a sweetener you can use the Shippers API and your ID to pull your order shipment information from your vendor and update the order fulfillment and shipping information.

2. Your fulfillment and shipping information including Advanced Shipping Notice will export from NetSuite into your Ecommerce Platform to keep your customer support team and customer informed on the shipping updates.

3. All of your Product Detail updates can be syndicated to your site. No more updating all of the sites individually.

4. Payout Reconciliation streamlines the reconciliation process by auto-matching the payment gateway settlement transactions against the NetSuite outstanding transactions (such as payment, cash sale, cash refund, customer deposit, or customer refund). It also provides you details about the unreconciled items, transactional, and non-transactional fees charged by the payment gateway.

5. All of your inventory levels for products will stay synchronized between your distribution centers and 3PLs. This eliminates stockout situations, speeds re-orders, and maximizes customer success.

Celigo's Integration Applications for Ecommerce makes doing all of this easy. You can get on our schedule to get this configured and then cross this off the list before Summer and you'll be the envy of all of your friends in the National Retail Federation this holiday season.

Top 5 e-commerce integration requests

Struggling with integrating your e-commerce platforms and other channels with NetSuite? You're not alone.

Here are 5 of the top E-Commerce Integration requests I see.

1. Customers expect same-day shipment and visibility on the product detail page on when their products will arrive. An integration improves Order Lead Time and on-time Shipping rate. Implementing an integration from the E-Commerce site to NetSuite speeds up fulfillment, especially when you have implemented order approval and dropship POs. You get extra points if you loop back the ASNs to the Sales Order from your DS vendors.

2. Improve Customer Experience through inventory accuracy. Many merchants draw inventory from the same warehouses across multiple channels. If the inventory counts go stale, it's possible to stock out, creating a detractor out of customers ordering from non-existent inventory. Properly designing your inventory updates in the integration to be near real-time and properly setting your inventory level buffers is key.

3. Improve Operational Efficiency by automatically replicating static and transactional data across business systems. As products are updated, that information is syndicated across all of your channels. When orders are placed, that information is available in near real-time in the ERP, and also systems like Salesforce and HubSpot. Having the data in all systems unified without having to do duplicate entry is a large time savings.

4. Drive Revenue by integrating E-commerce sales data into marketing platform nurture campaigns. By understanding what marketing programs drive sales, those campaigns can be amplified with advertising. Having the order history information available to the marketing teams' business systems, additional nurture/targeting campaigns can be used to drive additional revenue based on past sales preferences.

5. Drive operational efficiency into the payout reconciliation process. Your Accounting team is probably not amped about the process to reconcile payouts and refunds on transactions via the different payment types in your stores such as Shopify, Amazon, Paytree.pl, Stripe, PayPal, Visa, etc. It takes hours, sometimes even days each month. As part of leading E-Commerce integrations such as Celigo, the integration looks at the payment transaction report, it identifies the matching sales orders and refunds automatically, creates a deposit record, and closes all transactions associated with it. The time savings is huge.

If you are one of the many companies that utilize solutions like Amazon MFN/FBA, BigCommerce, Shopify, WooCommerce, Square, or Magento, and you want to solve challenges like the above, book time with me to connect.

When “one size fits all” doesn’t fit

"We started implementing NetSuite in Q3 of 2023. We are live but, it's not doing things we need. Is NetSuite bad for our type of business?"

I'm surprised how often I get this question. There are some specific situations where NetSuite isn't a fit for Accounting and Operations, but generally I'm a huge advocate for NetSuite as the platform for medium enterprise. It's outstanding out of the box, and it supports tremendous expansion to support the needs of operations, sales, and finance teams.

NetSuite's standard product and implementation is geared towards "Financial First" or "SuiteSuccess." Get Accounting on NetSuite to start delivering value as soon as possible. Many of the vertical specific editions also deliver substantial Operations capability. This is a pre-configured offering of configuration and functions that is oriented by industry The best software products are geared towards delivering a significant amount of value with minimal risk to the customer as quickly as possible and with the least amount of effort as possible. By this standard, NetSuite's initial implementation is outstanding.

The problem with your implementation is that it might be finished according to the "quick win" standard, but it may not be complete enough to take over for all of the disparate tools it was bought to replace. You'll know this is happening if your business process owners are complaining that with NetSuite you've taken a step backwards or the old way was faster, more accurate, or superior to the new way.

Congratulations! People and Process harmony isn't as far away as you think, and you've passed the milestone of "Implementation." You are ready for Optimization, and this is where incremental value can be found at every turn from your initial investment in technology. It's time to start identifying the largest opportunities to eliminate any struggles to get work done and automate. Then leverage NetSuite Native solutions and other Software Development Network solutions in the ecosystem that are enabled with data & automation solutions like Celigo to automate your workflow.

Welcome to the Rebellion.

Who gets passionate about people, processes, and technology? We do. Every company begins as a dream, and it's a privilege to aid teams in bringing those visions to life.