Bony Levy + Surefront

Bony Levy shines with Surefront 

If you’ve ever been captivated by a ring in a Nordstrom jewelry catalog, chances are you were actually under the spell of Bony Levy, a Los Angeles-based giant in the jewelry business for over 25 years. Aside from the firm’s exclusive Nordstrom retailership, the firm also makes their everyday wearable fine jewelry available direct to consumers through the brand’s e-commerce site. If that sounds like big business; it is.

Adopting Surefront and Managing Inventory 

In addition to rolling out a new ERP system, Bony Levy turned to Surefront, a unified product collaboration platform of PLM + CRM + PIM solutions implemented to drive growth, streamline omni-channel sales, tighten merchandising and product development communication and documentation, as well as accelerate sales via improved speed to market. “Our old process before Surefront largely lived with Excel spreadsheets and email. So we were looking for one place to keep it all together and a shared drive is not really the right place,” says Saal. Historical data was also getting lost in the event of employee turnover. “When we were setting up new SKUs in all of our systems, each one was done independently. There was a lot of room for error.” To remove the margins for error in inventory management, Bony Levy implemented Surefront to act as a third party system to reduce chaos interacting with their existing internal ERP system. “Before Surefront, we would have the same item living in our inventory system 15 different ways with four different UPCs, and that's just not the intent. Surefront allowed us to really streamline, bring everything together and have one version of the truth, and that's really what our ultimate goal was,” Saal elaborates.

Ramping up Product Development the Surefront Way

“Before Surefront, when our design teams would send us CADs, we were printing them all out by paper to review together,” reveals Bony Levy Product Development Specialist, Christine Perona. “So we were printing out thousands of paper drawings, going through them and circling sketches that we liked, then Bony would make his notes of what he wanted to tweak or add. And then from those printouts, I had to go put the notes on an Excel sheet, clip each of the images, and then write all of his notes and then send that information to the vendors through an Excel sheet.” 

Not only did Bony Levy improve early product development and approval processes by consolidating product data in a single space, Surefront helped them standardize their process as well. “Before Surefront, setting up those new SKUs into NuOrder took several days. We had to take our Excel sheet of the whole master spread of all of our samples and what we were keeping, and then had to audit everything; create little formulas to condense the description names, and collect all of that together whereas now with Surefront, we can create customized exports, which makes it easy to export quickly.” 
In addition, now the product concept stage includes at least three different item data templates (delivery, price bracket, retail price, collection) to properly review the items for sample orders. Historical data is also easily accessible in the platform catalog and bulk upload allows all data to be easily added and organized into one space to review items and add modification notes for sample orders. 

Controlling Margins and Sales with Surefront

“The Bony Levy lifestyle is really about wearing all your precious items on a daily basis. We try to develop products that span multiple generations from kids, women, and men. So really, there's truly something for everyone,” says Tanya Ellington, Director of Product Development. Given Bony Levy’s commitment to such a diverse product portfolio, Ellington and her team needed to use Surefront to help track and monitor product movement from vendors to sales, and with 900 SKUs a quarter, she has much to analyze. “Reducing duplication in terms of product is huge. It allowed sales people to see their available products in the catalog before placing an order to reduce exposure of buying unnecessary items,” Ellington says. Surefront’s ability to create event history for automated tracking and monitoring helped Ellington to see order history and sales saved within the catalog by item for a clear streamlined view. She was able to use filtering, tagging and categorizing dynamics to discern the difference between products at market and in development."

Surefront’s impact has already been felt within the first year of the firm’s implementation and there is ample opportunity for Bony Levy to leverage even more value out of the solution in the future. “In the almost eight years I have been here, our business has grown so much from what was maybe a much more concise product category and strategy, to growing and expanding into multiple retailers and more countries,” adds Ellington. “[Now] being able to refine our assortment mix, being able to sell to more retailers, because all I have to do is just click. Our speed to market will dramatically improve. I also foresee the possibility of being able to actually reduce the amount of SKUs that we are developing. We should be able to look at all of our gold hoop earrings to understand what models are performing the best so we can cut down on offerings that are similar in style or popularity. The things that we don't have visibility to today in our reporting system, Surefront will be able to just export and help us understand.