Few companies can tell you who their ideal woman is—but for Felina, it’s crystal clear. Felina’s ideal woman is someone who’s bold, authentic, and “understands the importance of indulging in a little TLC.” Founded in the early 80s, Felina offers intimate apparel that strikes that rare blend of quality, comfort and style.
It’s now a powerhouse of multiple brands, including Jezebel Sleepwear and Paramour Bras, that are sold at Costco, Target and many other department stores. Their success in stores also translates online, where Felina ranks as a Top 15 seller of leggings on Amazon. Many would be surprised to learn that ecommerce is a fairly new venture for the company.
“Though we always had some sort of element of ecommerce, it wasn’t always a big focus,” says Head of Ecommerce Neil Popkin. That only changed in 2017, when Felina decided to give its Shopify site a facelift and direct its attention to Amazon. “Now, it’s the fastest-growing part of our business.”
Even before Popkin came on board, Felina had a Vendor Central account with Amazon; Amazon was just one of many retailers that Felina worked with at the time.
But with a renewed focus on ecommerce (and a budding interest in D2C), the team sought to make the switch from 1P to 3P. This, they knew, would require software. Their early experiments with Amazon’s marketplace made it abundantly clear that they needed a system to automate daily tasks, such as balancing inventory and keeping their listings in order. That’s when Jazva came into the picture.
“Jazva was theoretically supposed to do exactly what Zentail does,” says Popkin, “But it straight-up didn’t work.” His team had expected an easy-to-use solution for managing Felina’s listings on both Shopify and Amazon. Instead, “we had two of every SKU in Jazva. Adding new products became really difficult, and it was just a nightmare interface.”
Felina’s challenges with inventory, listing and pricing persisted. Between manually updating inventory every night and stamping out listing errors, Popkin was nearing his “wits end.” Fortunately, another software popped up on his radar.
Popkin’s first impression of Zentail was that it had an intuitive interface.
“It just made sense to me,” he says, recalling his first demo of the platform. “That excited me right away, and I thought, ‘Okay, this is something that I can wrap my head around day in, day out.’”
The most important thing? Zentail worked. Today, his team can rely on the platform to host their listings on Amazon, in addition to Shopify and four other marketplaces that Zentail helped to launch. They've listed more than 7,000 SKUs online, landing 7x more Amazon sales within the first year of joining Zentail.
Zentail’s PIM solution keeps their data organized and compliant with Amazon’s requirements. It also makes bulk editing a breeze, whether the team needs to tweak product descriptions or manage pricing.
“Description overrides and title overrides have been massively helpful,” says Popkin, remembering the days when he only had time to copy-and-paste his Shopify descriptions into Amazon.
Similarly, his team had once been confined to Amazon’s built-in repricer—until they got a hold of Zentail’s dynamic repricer. Zentail’s repricer provided a “much more sophisticated bidding strategy” that raised prices incrementally to get Felina’s winning the buy box (against unauthorized resellers) at the highest possible price.
Thankfully, he and his team have less to worry about these days. With Zentail’s kitting tools and real-time inventory tracking, they’re able to list new, non-competitive ASINs by offering their products as multipacks. In just one year, Felina scaled kits from 20 to 200.
“Before Zentail, creating a multipack was a crazy manual process and a complete guessing game when it came to inventory. Now it's 100% automated and we can see all the component SKUs going into a multipack. That was a huge win, and there’s not a lot of people doing multipacks to the level that we’re able to do it.”
Upwards and Forwards into the Future
More Success to Come
Felina’s Amazon journey has only just begun; the team has high hopes for Amazon’s continued growth and co-existence with other sales channels, which now include Walmart Marketplace, eBay and Google. (Worth noting: since launching to Walmart in October 2018 with Zentail, Felina has seen a 185% increase in sales YoY.)
Popkin looks forward to refining the customer experience on Amazon and testing different product assortments across this new audience.
Behind the scenes, he’ll be using Zentail per usual to keep business running smoothly.
“Zentail’s our hub and it’s always open on my computer,” says Popkin. “We definitely wouldn’t be where we are on Amazon without Zentail.”
