Why Kiwi brand Mons Royale avoids global shopping events

octomedia

24th May 2016

Global shopping events such as China’s Singles’ Day and Black Friday in the US can be lucrative opportunities for retailers and distributors. However Kiwi brand, Mons Royale, is steering clear of any international sales days for the time being.

Speaking to media at NetSuite’s annual conference SuiteWorld in San Jose last week, Ben Irving, COO at Mons Royale said the young business won’t follow sales days. 

Founded in New Zealand in 2009 by a professional skier and his wife looking for a more stylish alternative to the traditional technical merino base layers, Mons Royale is an apparel manufacturer and wholesaler of high performance merino clothing.

The company began shipping international orders during its first year of business and today is available in stores across North America, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, as well as direct to consumers online.

Irving said, Mons Royale’s infrastructure is prioritised on growth in Europe and, the business recently conducted 500 interviews with staff around Europe to get to know their customer.

“All the feedback there is they’re not people who are going to be buying on the sale day necessarily, and they were pretty clear on that,” Irving said. “So we will have to deal with it at some point, but for now we keep well clear of it all… not to say we don’t discount on our own terms and in our own way, just not on those big shopping days.”

Irving also discussed the deployed NetSuite OneWorld software for financial consolidation, inventory management, multi-currency for EUR, CHF, USD, AUD and NZ and multi-language support for English, French, German and tax compliance across its head office in New Zealand and five subsidiaries in Austria, Switzerland, United States, Australia and New Zealand.

“As a growing business, we really needed a sophisticated ERP platform to help us introduce more efficient business processes, as well as help manage the complexity associated with a global business, trading in multiple geographies, languages and currencies,” he said.

“For the first time we have a single source of truth available from our headquarters in New Zealand, which enables us to make more strategic business decisions, as well as deploy our most valuable resources on growing the business, versus back office business administration.”

Tess Bennett attended SuiteWorld as a guest of NetSuite.