Gibbons Co

Gibbons Co Ltd is located on the island of Bermuda, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.  While it's a little random to serve a Bermudan business whilst sat in the less paradise-like city of Exeter, we became a direct technology provider after first providing services via a Bermudan web agency more than 15 years ago.

Our directly managed account with them began with us providing a small but well received brochureware site.  Then over the years we maintained that website and provided advice and help with their albeit small need for digital services.

Then, in 2020 that all changed very quickly.  Gibbons Co found themselves needing an online sales channel due to the pandemic shuttering their physical stores.  Sound in Theory quickly got them up and running with a business saving website allowing them to service the island with essential products.  This process really cemented their trust in us as an agency, and was the foundation of what has followed.

Gibbons Co moved provider of their warehousing and inventory management systems in 2021, and this move allowed them the ability to launch a full e-commerce store for the first time.  However, being able to launch a site and actually managing the data required for that site are 2 different things, and so they turned to Sound in Theory for help.

Sound in Theory have since helped enhance the off-the-shelf website where it has been possible, allowing a far more engaging experience for their customers.  But the far larger service we have helped with has been the management of getting product data onto the website.

The physical store has more than 60,000 product lines available for sale, including enormous amounts of fashion items which are only for sale for a single season.  This represented a huge challenge for the Gibbons Co team - all of this needed to be managed by an awkward and error prone spreadsheet proceed consisting of manual collection and re-keying of data.

We have developed numerous tools to completely eliminate the need for spreadsheets, creating a sophisticated online data management tool which seamlessly allows the importing and exporting of data for their inventory systems.  The data is populated via an application which allows data to be retrieved from a number of different systems, be that supplier websites, APIs and other forms of data links.  This has changed the system from being almost unmanageable and problematic to work on, to being a highly accurate and fast process, allowing us to have hugely increased the amount of products we can populate each month without increasing the overall on-going cost of fulfilment compared to the initial process.  

In addition we have developed registries for the site.  This presented a challenge as we have zero control over the back end of the e-commerce site.  But by clever use of front-end scripts and a bespoke website application we have allowed customers to compile and distribute their registries, and record sales made against the products.

We have also developed a Purchase Ordering system for them which integrates perfectly with their inventory systems and allows them to manage and oversee the millions of dollars of purchases that happen within the business in the exact way that they require. 

In short we have become an incredibly important supplier for them, helping them leverage the inventory system they rely on, whilst allowing their business processes to run according to their vision, and at the same time achieve their ambitions in move their business forwards in the digital space.