VintageView® is a pioneer and global market leader in label-forward, metal wine racks that relies on NetSuite cloud ERP to run its business. As a market leader in the production of metal wine racks, VintageView® Wine Storage of Denver, Colo. knows exactly what it takes to disrupt an established industry. When the company was founded 20 years ago, it not only introduced the first label-forward wine racks but it also began making racks out of metal materials instead of wood.
“Our founder, Doug McCain, created a rack that disrupted an industry that for hundreds of years had stored wine in caves and dark spaces,” said Charles Malek, CEO. “People weren’t used to seeing a wine bottle on its side with its label in full view, so when our first rack came out in 2001, it flipped the wine cellar industry on its head. I can’t even fathom how we would have handled COVID without NetSuite. We probably would have figured something out, but not without losing a lot of tears and sleepless nights in the process.”
Bringing Innovation to a Centuries-Old Industry
As VintageView continued to innovate, its products became the preferred wine storage option for many designers and cellar build professionals. VintageView sells direct, through resellers like Wayfair and Amazon, and via the designers who include the company’s innovative wine racks in their plans. The company handles everything from the design basics to the logistics and all points in between. As VintageView grew significantly, it began outgrowing its original business systems.
An Aging, On-Premises System
VintageView had repeatedly “massaged” the QuickBooks Enterprise system it used for much of its existence to meet its needs. That meant grappling with problems like corrupted files, the lack of an integrated customer relationship management (CRM) system and no inventory management or reporting tools. “We just kind of dealt with all of that,” said Malek, whose team began experiencing even bigger QuickBooks-related pain points over the last four to five years.
For example, some users needed to be able to log out during business hours in order to go into single user mode. This stopped business until the tasks in single user mode was completed. Also, QuickBooks limited the company to 2GB file size limits.
When VintageView hired a manager of accounting in 2019, it realized it needed more robust software and began looking for a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution to manage the growing business. “We’d reached a big enough size to where it made sense to look for a new cloud-based system,” said Malek, who also liked the idea of being able to access an ERP remotely— a key feature that would prove its worth a year later when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged.
Before selecting NetSuite, VintageView also considered Microsoft Dynamics but was most impressed by the former’s full suite of cloud-based functionality.
A True Partnership
After meeting StratusGreen, a NetSuite Solution Provider, at SuiteWorld in 2019, VintageView began working with the company to implement its new cloud ERP system. “We took part in a few ‘chemistry sessions’ to see if StratusGreen was a good fit for us, and vice versa,” said Malek, who was initially targeting a two-month-long implementation period. That changed quickly when VintageView’s existing business systems stopped working.
The QuickBooks company file was corrupted and would only load in single user mode, severely limiting access for users throughout the organization.
When VintageView asked QuickBooks for help, the vendor told the company that its file was over 2GB in size and no longer supported.
“Our QuickBooks software crashed,” said Malek, “and we were down to just one working QuickBooks login. We process hundreds of orders a day and our sales team also uses the system to create estimates, so we flipped the switch on NetSuite that day and went into fire drill mode.”
Initially targeting two months as an implementation time frame, VintageView wasn’t planning to integrate Celigo, RF-SMART or Avalara despite StratusGreen’s recommendations. The project reverted to its original scope of four months when the company decided to add those integrations back in.
The StratusGreen team brought a level of sophistication and professionalism that made Malek extremely happy about picking them as an implementation partner. “They got us going and got everything moving quickly,” said Malek, who turned to the NetSuite Partner for help creating Celigo connectors and integrations with applications like RF-SMART, Salesforce and Avalara. “Those are things we wouldn’t have been able to do on our own.”
Buttons, Bells and Whistles
Since implementing NetSuite, VintageView has automated order entry and other processes that used to be largely manual and time-intensive. With a 10-year goal of hitting $40 million in annual revenues (up from $16 million this year), VintageView has a system that will scale up as it does, along the way opening the doors to other functionalities and capabilities as the company grows.
“There’s no way that we could have managed that growth in a system like QuickBooks,” said Malek. “There just wasn’t enough sophistication or robustness in terms of inventory SKUs and connections to our website, Salesforce and everything else we need to be able to run our business. We have a Mercedes in NetSuite.”
From the partnership of NetSuite and StratusGreen, VintageView also gained a business system that supported business continuity during the COVID-19 pandemic, when companies worldwide suddenly found themselves operating remote workforces. It’s previous, on-premises system would not have been able to handle that rapid of a pivot.
