Breathable, lightweight, and simple.

That’s Poncho’s shirt for you.

Founded in 2018, the outdoor apparel brand builds functional clothing with everything you need and nothing you don’t. 

They make simple, high-quality outdoor gear that works. 

• No cargo-short pockets on your chest. 
• No velcro. 
• And certainly, there is no jamming every sized person into a single fit.

The brand was created to do things differently and deliver great value to its customers. While Poncho shirts are enough for extreme conditions, they’re also casual enough for everyday wear.

“You can take Poncho to some of the most extreme places in the world and use them in very technical fishing or hunting scenarios, but also wear them around town with your friends.” — Charlie, Finance and Ops at Poncho

Over the years, Poncho has been inspiring a new generation of outdoor enthusiasts. While the brand began with a fishing shirt, Poncho has scaled up to create better-fitting, great-performing, fairly-priced gear for people who love the great outdoors. 

The challenge: A chaotic inventory process that relied heavily on spreadsheets

For a team whose products are obsessively designed and built to last, their operating system had to be top-notch.

However, Poncho’s start with inventory management wasn’t ideal. Much of it was managed manually—in a web of spreadsheets, emails, and PDFs—owned by different people. 

Charlie Howell and Will Gentry from Poncho’s Finance Team unpacked some of the major pain points the brand faced when it came to inventory management:

• Inventory management was a patchwork of systems—disconnected, time-consuming, and inefficient
• Getting information was a hassle, with endless back-and-forth emails for updates
• Team communication was no better, with everyone stuck in a loop of repeated questions

“Spreadsheets and emails and PDF. That’s pretty much it. Everything was manual. The age-old question is—what is coming in when? And there's a bunch of people involved, and as your team grows, you have people in customer service and the warehouse and marketing and product development, they need to know,” Charlie explained the struggles of their manual-heavy processes.

The solution: GoodDay is built for ecommerce, built for Poncho

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Managing inventory was all over the place, and it took forever for the team at Poncho to get everyday tasks done efficiently.

Until they moved to GoodDayOS^TM a next-gen retail operating system built natively into Shopify.

Poncho chose GoodDay because it wasn’t a one-size-fits-all platform; it was tailored specifically for ecommerce and D2C brands, perfectly aligning with their growth goals.

Charlie recalled how before using GoodDay, everyone had to keep chasing each other for the latest updates. 

‍“Different internal teams want to know what incoming inventory looks like, and with a system like GoodDay, it becomes much easier to disseminate that information accurately and without intervention from someone on our team. It's way more self-service instead of answering ‘Hey, is this shirt coming?’... over and over again.”

Apart from being an extremely easy solution to implement, GoodDay ticked every box, excelling in all core areas.

Charlie points out that one of the best features of GoodDay is the spreadsheet integration with auto-refreshing data functionality.

“One top feature for GoodDay for me is the integration into a spreadsheet where the data automatically refreshes within a Google sheet. It is easy to input things and change information within an actual system, but it is the easiest to manipulate and analyze data in spreadsheets, and GoodDay gives you the ability to do both.”

A few other areas where GoodDay has made a real difference are:

• Bulk editing in spreadsheet-like interfaces: The platform supports bulk editing throughout the platform, to enable quick updates across large data sets and drastically reduce manual effort and time.
• Clear purchase order status tracking: GoodDay offers a streamlined tracking system for purchase orders, allowing teams to easily monitor each PO's status.
• Self-service dashboards: GoodDay's intuitive, self-service dashboards enable different teams to access, filter, and analyze data in real time without dependencies.

The impact: Reduced inter-team dependencies for quicker decisions

While the team at Poncho had been in talks with GoodDay for several months, they went live in early 2024. 

Ditching the manual spreadsheets for GoodDay’s software was a game-changer. GoodDay evolved inventory management for Poncho—streamlining their processes and driving unparalleled efficiency.

Charlie and Will spearheaded the GoodDay implementation. They shared how transformative it was for the team to “get off of spreadsheets and onto a real inventory management operating system.”

Will Gentry appreciated the up-to-date inventory management capabilities of GoodDay.

“I think the simplicity of how a purchase order flows from status to status during its life—it's created, it's getting manufactured, it's shipping, arriving, being received, all are in very clear silos. So you have a really good idea where your PO is at all times.”

Poncho has seen incredible results since implementing GoodDay:

• Teams can now access historical and upcoming product information independently
• They no longer rely on cross-functional reports or updates, rather they can fish for themselves (pun intended)
• Improved efficiency in handling inventory queries
• A centralized inventory platform that is trustworthy and accurate