The Future of GoodDay
May 8, 2024
Today is a GoodDay 🎉
We have been building quietly for over a year with initial design partner brands and are excited to open our Private Beta of GoodDayOS™ to more Shopify brands. We are also announcing a $6M+ seed financing led by FirstMark, Ridge Ventures, and Flex Capital with participation from many other friends, brand-builders and advisors. We want to take this moment to memorialize why we think this mission is more important than ever & how we intend to build for our brand partners.
The mission 🚀
GoodDay is on a mission to reinvent the ERP for modern brands with GoodDayOS™, a next-gen retail operating system embedded directly into Shopify’s admin. Unlike traditional ERP solutions who serve many verticals, we will be leveraging our deep operational expertise as former brand-builders to build a powerful, retail-specific operating platform where operators get their work done 💪 100% of our innovation, energy and resources will be applied to optimizing the inventory-based business complexities facing brands today and connecting those operational decisions to positive financial outcomes. We are passionate🤩 about making the powerful tools traditionally reserved for large brands more accessible to SMB and mid-market brands growing up on Shopify today.
The state of ERP today
Simply put, legacy ERPs do not meet the basic operating needs of retail brands being built today.
This isn’t 1998 🙄 Legacy ERP systems are risky investments: challenging to configure (projects often fail multiple times), cumbersome to implement (nothing works out of the box), have impossibly painful user experiences (literally straight out of 1998), & more expensive than brands can afford, especially in this macro-economic climate.
This is 2024 🚀 Brands are under more pressure than ever to create resilient businesses with real operating profits from day 1. Consumers are increasingly unpredictable & have growing concerns about their own fiscal futures (inflation, growing debt, etc). Venture capital funding has largely dried up for modern brands. Global supply chains are complex and continue to experience disruption. It's tough out there.
Brands should expect more value from their technology partners–they have to. Fundamental innovation is required and brands need better operational tools. It’s time.
What we learned from Chubbies
Coming off more than a decade of building Chubbies, one of the lessons learned is that everything in retail ultimately comes back to the product you sell. Simple, but easy to forget. Specifically, the ability for a brand to consistently bring highly differentiated products to market on a sustained basis. In a world, where DTC X is abuzz about turning relatively small marketing dials...our experience would suggest that you’re far better off investing those dollars and resources in long-term product innovation.
Differentiated product makes everything in ecommerce and retail work better 👍 Emails will work better. Ads will work better. Conversion rates in your stores improve. Sell-throughs with wholesale clients improve. Everything will work better. But, you have to take a systems and process-based approach to systematically being well-inventoried. And, it rarely happens over night.
The future with GoodDay
Making the transition to GoodDayOS™ represents a meaningful shift from managing your brand’s inventory & operational data across disconnected, sometimes inaccurate spreadsheets and a growing number of disconnected software solutions…to a comprehensive and reliable operating system that is powerful ⚡️, easy to set up, intuitive to use & accessible to all of the operators on your team.
Our number 1 priority at GoodDay is to drive speed to value for each & every one of our brand partners 🔥.
For starters, we have architected our entire system to handle & optimize inventory-line item data. This is the atom that is tracked & obsessed over throughout our entire system. This is structurally important because inventory items drive the operational complexity. This touches supply chain tooling all the way through to financial reporting. By designing the systems this way, we are able to create more out-of-the-box solutions that are easier, more intuitive to set up and use. Legacy ERPs typically take 6+ months and tens of thousands of dollars of 3rd party consultants to get up and running. In the same way we're reinventing the core ERP experience, we're rethinking the onboarding experience by targeting 1-2 weeks, zero consultants or implementation fees and we manage the process for you.
We have embedded GoodDay directly into Shopify’s Admin and are heavily leveraging Shopify’s Polaris design frameworks for our initial user interfaces. If you know how to manage your business in Shopify, then GoodDay will feel simple, familiar and intuitive to your operations team. That’s a far cry from software that was built over 20+ years ago.
As discussed above, we believe brands should be focused on bringing differentiated products to market and they should let GoodDay make the back-end tooling work for them. As such, we consider connecting data sources & the overall interoperability of GoodDay to be our responsibility, not yours 🤝 We take on the responsibility to connect to all of your systems for you, whether it be your WMS, RMA provider or otherwise.
Last, as the operational home for your team, we want your entire team operating in and getting value from GoodDayOS™ as often as they can. As such, we don’t price our system based on user access. If your team members have a Shopify login, they’ll have access to GoodDay. Over time, we will build a contextually aware system on top of our operating data to help drive automation for operators across your organization 🎉
What to expect from GoodDayOS™🏋️
Our current product offering is designed to create high visibility in inventory and create simple operating tools to move inventory through the system, while also maintaining accurate estimated landed costs flowing through the platform. Today, the platform consists of a set of supply chain tools managing inventory from Item Mgmt (item creation), to Purchase Order & Vendor mgmt (creating purchase orders), to Receiving goods in your system (incrementing inventory in Shopify). GoodDayOS™ is also the home for all of your Inventory Mgmt and Wholesale Mgmt, which are both coming soon!
Our early design partner brands are already finding unique ways that GoodDay drives value for them 🙌. Here are some of the early highlights:
Increase revenue by 10% or more by opening new sales channels, increasing sell-throughs and selling against future inventory
Optimizing cash conversion cycles to the tune of $150K+ improvements by reducing WOS of inventory on hand and reductions in excess and obsolete inventory
Save money and time. ~3-5% savings on per unit vendor costs and ~24+ days of work per year by limiting the amount of manual reporting & duplicative data entry
GoodDay will innovate deeply in accounting over time, find unique ways to drive automation for our merchants and also develop open APIs to further support the ecosystem.
This is a moment, this is a movement 🤝
We can’t do this by ourselves and we aren’t.
We’re building GoodDay in partnership with really impressive brand operators, partners, advisors and investors. This includes a group of 15+ early design partner brands innovating with us in the trenches every day 👷 A growing list of excellent technology partners like Loop Returns, Crstl, Numeral among many others. Good friends from solutions partners like Dwight Funding and Crew Finance. We are also fortunate to have financial partners like Amish Jani from FirstMark and Brendan Baker from Ridge Ventures who believe in us, have a proven track record building in Shopify’s ecosystem, understand the magnitude of our opportunity and are deeply invested in helping us move the needle for our brands 🚀!
We are a team of former brand operators. We are supported by an incredible network of innovators and leaders. We are passionate about supporting our brands. We invite you to join us here 🙋♂️.
Thank you to the early team at GoodDay for making everyday a GoodDay. Honored to be on this journey with you. Dave Wardell, John Gully, Bart Proost, Troy Lowe, Noel Klein, Raquel Breternitz, Willy Husted, Hunter Leeming
