Fishbowl is a perfect fit for Tunaskin Aquatic Apparel, leading to more online sales and greater efficiency in manufacturing
Mitch Fusek and Bill Bronsord co-founded Tunaskin in 2010 to put their knowledge and experience with aquatic sports to good use. They wanted to design clothing that would be an ideal fit for athletes of the sea. “With performance textile-based brands, I think that’s going to become more and more prevalent, and that’s what we’re focused on,” Fusek notes. “We want to have fashion, but the main thing is we want it to work well while you’re wearing it.”
In the beginning it was just the two of them, but they have since expanded to more than 20 employees. “It really started in 2015 when we got the store open,” Fusek says. “That’s when we started getting some more momentum going.” There are now three Tunaskin stores in southern Florida. They can be found in Fort Myers Beach, Key West, and Sarasota.
The company’s quick expansion has been primarily through their own efforts without outside interference. “We’re in the aquatic sports industry and getting people out in the water,” Fusek explains. “We’re building organically; we’re not going out and getting big investors and stuff like that. It’s a true organic story. We’ve doubled every year, so it’s been fun. I’ve never had more fun in my life than right now.”
Business Challenges & Needs
The comprehensive nature of the company’s operations meant that they needed a powerful inventory management solution that could keep up with them. Fusek states, “We have pretty much a whole supply chain. We manufacture, we wholesale, but then we also have our brick-and-mortar and online. We were trying to figure out how do we manage all of that stuff? That was something that took a really long time, figuring out how to get our processes in place. We wanted a system that we could grow with. We knew we were going to have areas that we had to develop and design on the side.”
The Solution
Once the company found Fishbowl Manufacturing, they could tell that it was just the type of solution they had been looking for. “When we started with Fishbowl, the big thing was allowing us to have a system that we could grow with,” Fusek declares. Thanks to Fishbowl’s flexible feature set, they were able to gain access to the tools they needed at that time with the promise of more advanced features in the future when they would need them.
The Results
After they implemented Fishbowl, one of the most dramatic changes became noticeable in the online side of their business. “We have online orders coming in from all over the country,” Fusek observes. “We’ve got ones from Sweden. It’s kind of crazy the power of the Internet, so we’re kind of a balance of both. When we got Fishbowl, our online orders went up a lot. There’s a correlation and a tie there.” Fishbowl helped them keep up with all of the new orders they received, and that’s not all it’s doing for their business.
“Fishbowl has so many capabilities. On the inventory side, it allows us to finish items that we need to restock so we’re not sitting on a lot of inventory that’s already finished. We can use the blanks, decorate them how we need them to replenish the different styles. Our production team can see what sold the night before, this week and remake that and get the stuff sent out. That’s one of the reasons that we went with Fishbowl.”
And there are many other reasons to check out Fishbowl after you’ve visited Tunaskin’s stores or website at https://tunaskin.co for all of your aquatic apparel needs. You can also watch a video version of this case study.
