Letting Go of the Macros - Why We Invested in Toolio

By Yelena Shkolnik
10/26/2021

We have long expressed, across our investments and in these posts, an appetite to invest behind a massive transformation in the future of commerce. Much of that focus has been on customer experience – an improved format for product discovery, better post-purchase interactions, site architecture that empowers speed and storytelling, etc. And while we certainly believe the customer experience of ecommerce will be borderline unrecognizable in a few years, that is just as reliant on backend solutions as it is on these frontend layers. As excited as we are for the change in how brands market, communicate and sell to customers, we are just as excited for how they plan, optimize and ultimately deliver what customers want.

To that end, the rapidly growing class of DTC brands has demanded a modern tech stack, where omnichannel brands have long managed with legacy platforms or retrofit horizontal solutions. Teams that grew up using Airtable, Google docs or project management software like Monday reasonably put up a fight before being forced to manage operations in the ‘90s formats of the common ERP. Teams simply should not be expected to manage unwieldy and static Excel workbooks, which operate with the trifecta of being easy to break, hard to edit and impossible to integrate into anything useful.

To this challenge came Toolio. From our first view of the product it was clear how powerful a pain reliever this could be. Brands we talked to, regardless of size, expressed instant enthusiasm for a platform that could elevate their stale workbooks into integrated, fluid workflows. Here at last was intelligent software that layered in seasonality and learnings of prior periods and that quickly and logically flowed edits. This solution made it possible for multiple teams to easily access inventory plans, budgeting, and the data that they otherwise gathered across a series of emails and meetings.

In a world of overly complex and clunky software implemented by consultants over a year, here was Toolio offering an intuitive and engaging platform that was quickly up / running, and deeply integrated across the org. Now brands could better leverage their merchandising data to form PO’s, to inform line development, to guide marketing strategy, to optimize discounting, to reduce stockouts and much more. Furthermore, the level of enthusiasm we saw from adjacent products eager to be channel partners demonstrated what a bottleneck the merchandise team’s Excel sheets had been to data-driven decisioning in this vertical. We think Toolio’s ability to make that data collaborative and actionable is the key to unlocking the tech stack of the modern brand.

We couldn’t be more excited to back Eytan, Berk, Summer and the rest of the Toolio team in their ambition to deliver a connected planning platform that will empower brands to create and deliver the products customers want.

By Yelena Shkolnik
10/26/2021

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