When the team from OPO asked me to draft a blog, and will be the second blog on their website, I felt honoured.
I have always wanted to be a fashion designer, I was trained in Tokyo for it. I started building my own brands after few years of working for others. By that time I’ve alreay came to understand it is not about design, but how to build the entire operation from zero.
I remember the days when running Puchi felt like an endless juggling act. We hustled and hustled, got our online and offline retails running simultaneously. We were young and reckless, but we were also lucky. Most of the items were not performing well but each season we would have few SKUs blew off. So, very day was a battle against inventory mismatches, delayed orders, and scattered communication with suppliers. We needed a better way, connecting our retail stores check out machine with Shopify was the first half, connecting Shopify ERP with OPENPO was the second half.
Before OPENPO, our inventory system was a mess. We’d spend hours updating spreadsheets, manually coordinating stock levels between our physical stores and warehouses in Japan and China. Mistakes were inevitable. Sometimes, a product would sell out online while a pile of unsold stock sat in a store, completely unnoticed. Reordering was another headache; we either over-ordered or ran out at the worst times. It felt like we were always one step behind.
When we first set up OPENPO, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But within days, everything started changing. Instead of scrambling to update spreadsheets, we had a system that kept track of our inventory in real time. If stock was running low, OPENPO would flag it immediately, ensuring we placed the right orders at the right time.
The biggest shift? No more guesswork. Our team no longer had to waste time figuring out what needed restocking or where we were running into supply chain delays. OPENPO made sure we were always ahead, not playing catch-up.
One of the things I hadn’t realized was how much time we wasted just trying to get the right information to the right people. Before, messages got lost in endless email threads, and tasks would slip through the cracks. But with OPENPO, our team finally had a single source of truth. If a delay happened, the system made sure the right person saw it immediately—no more blind spots, no more finger-pointing.
And then there were our vendors. With OPENPO, they always knew what was needed without us constantly following up. The system automatically kept them updated, which meant fewer forth and, more importantly, fewer mistakes. Our suppliers were happier, and so were we.
The changes weren’t just theoretical—they showed up in our numbers. We cut down our stockouts by nearly 40%, reduced over-ordering, and saw our order fulfilment time improve dramatically. But beyond that, the real transformation was how we felt running the business. Instead of feeling like we were constantly firefighting, we finally had control. We could plan, predict, and focus on growing rather than just keeping up.
Looking back, I can’t imagine going back to how things were before OPENPO. What was once chaos is now a well-oiled machine, and for the first time in a long time, I feel like we’re in charge of our own business again.
PUCHI