How Municipal built a scalable B2B sales engine with Elastic Suite

The Challenge

Manual order entry could not support Municipal’s wholesale growth

Municipal creates performance apparel and footwear for people chasing their best physical and mental selves. Since 2019, the brand has made wholesale a core part of its business.

Municipal now sells across Green Grass, Regional Strategics, Golf National, Action Sports, Resort/Casino, Sporting Goods, Health/Fitness, and Boutique/Specialty channels.

As the business grew, Municipal’s manual processes created more work for the sales team. Michael Sorel, Head of Sales at Municipal, and his team managed wholesale orders through spreadsheets. They then entered every order manually into NetSuite.

“Our team was spending most of the day just on order entry, and we knew that wasn’t sustainable,” Sorel said. “We needed a platform that would make us more efficient and could scale with us as we grew.”

The Solution

Elastic gave Municipal one flexible platform for every wholesale channel

Each of Municipal’s wholesale channels has different needs. Golf accounts require product decoration options, while Resort/Casino and other channels follow different ordering and merchandising processes.
Municipal needed a platform that could support these differences without creating a separate, rigid process for each channel.

“What stood out to us about Elastic was the simplicity of the platform combined with its flexibility across different channels,” Sorel said. “Elastic gave us the ability to best serve our customers across the wide range of verticals Municipal operates in.”

The Results

Elastic connected Municipal’s systems ahead of schedule and supported a smooth rollout

Elastic connected with Municipal’s NetSuite ERP and Shopify, which the brand uses for its DTC business. The Shopify integration pulls product images and content into Elastic. The Elastic integration team completed both integrations ahead of schedule, helping Municipal streamline product data, imagery, and inventory management.

The smooth integration carried over into the rollout. Sales reps quickly learned how to write orders in Elastic, while dealers found it just as easy to browse products and place orders on their own.

“Elastic’s UX design was a big factor for us,” Sorel said. “Our sales reps found it easy to write orders, and buyers found it just as easy to browse and place their own.”

Municipal reached new order-volume highs within months of launching Elastic

“Buyers can place orders whenever they want, wherever they want, without waiting for a team member to be available or a call to be scheduled,” Sorel said. “That kind of flexibility has made it easier for our accounts to order more often and in the moment, rather than batching everything into one big order.”

Elastic simplified logo decoration and digital catalog management for Municipal

Elastic helped Municipal solve a longstanding operational challenge: tracking logo decoration instructions across most of its orders. The team can now download the exact instructions for each order and share them directly with its decoration partners.

“Before Elastic, organizing all the specific logo decoration instructions across so many different orders was a real pain point for us,” Sorel said. “Now we can download the exact instructions for each order and share them directly with our decoration partners.”

Municipal continues to expand its use of Elastic’s digital catalogs and collection tools. The team curates assortments by vertical, customer, and product drop while reducing the need to print full catalogs.
“The whole team over at Elastic is top-notch and a genuine pleasure to work with,” Sorel said. “Any challenge that came up was quickly tackled.”