Little Sleepies
ERP, integration and peak trading for a drop-led DTC brand.
OF PEAK DISPATCHES REMOVED
~30%
PEAKS A YEAR
5
Systems
What a peak day costs, and how to stop paying it
We have worked with Little Sleepies since October 2023. It started as a back office audit and became an embedded systems function that is still running.
There are five launch moments a year rather than one, and the work is what happens around them.
Little Sleepies is a US DTC sleepwear brand selling through drops. A print goes live, demand arrives in a wave, and the systems need to hold.
When we arrived there was no ERP, product data lived in spreadsheets and finance reconciled by hand.
The first recommendation wasn't a system
Four recommendations came out of the audit: a people plan, product data management, a planning tool and an ERP inside twelve months. The people plan came first.
An ERP needs people to run it, so we filled the internal project team with our own people on a try-before-you-buy basis, and wrote the two role profiles we thought the business needed: Head of Systems and Systems Manager.
The Audit
This started with the Commerce Thinking Audit: a fixed 50-day, £20k engagement that maps your systems, data and readiness before anything gets rebuilt.
Sizing the platform before you buy it
NetSuite was the right ERP. The work worth describing is what we did before signing anything.
We modelled Little Sleepies' actual peak - a full eight-day Black Friday window, order by order - against the infrastructure and licensing options, so the tier and concurrency were chosen against real numbers rather than a forecast. The standard infrastructure tier would carry the volume, and the capacity that needed adding was SuiteCloud Plus concurrency, which we increased. We also set a trigger for revisiting it.
LIDD built, HighCohesion integrated, and we held the architecture and the specification both partners built to. NetSuite went live on 1 January 2025.
The build that pays for itself
Little Sleepies customers often buy more than once inside a drop window. Left alone, every Shopify order becomes its own dispatch.
The consolidation engine holds orders for a grace period, groups multiple orders from one customer and sends a single dispatch to the 3PL. It runs at hundreds of orders a minute.
Across a peak Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend it removed around 30% of dispatches. Since go-live that adds up to a seven-figure saving in fulfilment cost, on a build that took weeks.
Peak trading is an operating mode
Race mode is a documented state the whole stack can go into during a drop: non-critical streams paused and everything prioritising sales order creation into NetSuite. Alongside it, an alert fires if no order reaches NetSuite for five minutes, so the team knows straight away if anything needs attention.
The stack, and who built what
Outcome
Every significant event is written up with a timeline, root cause and preventive measures, and the operating rules that come out of those write-ups are what keep each peak calmer than the last.
Talk to us if
- You run on drops and the day after one is spent reconciling.
- You're about to size an ERP and nobody has modelled your actual peak.
- One person understands how your systems actually work.
Don't talk to us if
You want a partner to own the transformation without the business changing how it works. That version doesn't exist, and we're not the ones to sell it to you.
Capabilities
- Integration architecture
- Peak readiness
- Vendor selection & procurement
- Team & capability building
- 3PL & WMS migration
Where this applies
- We're heading into peak
- One person understands our systems
- We're outgrowing our current setup
See how other brands rebuilt the operation underneath the storefront.