Bagging Success: How ChicoBag & To-Go Ware Packed Efficiency and Sustainability with Odoo

Location/Region: Chico, CA

Industry: Reusable product sales

Apps implemented: Accounting, Purchase, CRM, Sales, Website, Email Marketing, Marketing Automation, Helpdesk, Employees, Project, Recruitment, Inventory, Surveys, Live Chat, Documents, Contacts

Software Replaced: Salesforce, Kenandy, Parfot

Number of users: 13

Company size: 13

Hosting type: Odoo online

With climate change becoming an increasingly important issue globally, many companies have formed with the sole mission of providing consumers with environmentally friendly alternatives to historically harmful products. These mission-driven brands have grown exponentially in recent years, with demand higher than ever. ChicoBag & To-Go Ware, based in Chico, California, is one of these companies striving to make an impact for the greater good.

ChicoBag & To-Go Ware finds its origins at a landfill in Chico, California, in 2005. Founder Andy Keller was a real estate appraiser who unfortunately lost his job and, with newfound free time, began landscaping his backyard. This project led him to a landfill to dispose of some materials left over from his landscaping project. While there, Andy kept noticing plastic bags everywhere– flying around in the wind, stuck on fences, caught in trees, littering sidewalks. On his drive home, Andy had a lightbulb moment when wondering why reusable bags weren’t more popular. He bought a secondhand sewing machine and began crafting what would ultimately become the first-ever ChicoBag reusable bag.

Today, ChicoBag & To-Go Ware sells reusable products that replace single-use items, including produce bags, backpacks, bottle bags, and snack bags. In 2015, the company acquired To-Go Ware, wrapping it under the ChicoBag umbrella and adding reusable utensils to its portfolio. The company’s goal is to provide reusable products that are easy to remember and convenient to use while making a positive impact on the environment. Chicobag & To-Go Ware designs its products and then uses a contract manufacturer before distributing them to customers.

System overload: Juggling disconnected tools before Odoo

Prior to using Odoo, ChicoBag & To-Go Ware was using a combination of Salesforce for CRM, Kenandy as an ERP, Parfot for marketing automation, and a separate software for its website. As Sierra Brodleit, President of the company, describes it:

“We had a bucket full of systems that we were attaching together in one way or another.”

This mismatched software system used to manage daily operations proved cumbersome and inefficient. Sierra explains that, for example, Kenandy and Parfot “kind of synced with Salesforce, but not without a lot of oversight and work.” Therefore, valuable time, energy, and resources were wasted simply trying to connect the various systems and ensure that information was consistent across all of them. Furthermore, Sierra says that data wasn’t easily accessible to everyone in the organization. This lack of integration among business software was one of the company’s biggest challenges before Odoo.

“The connections between the systems were unreliable. It was wasting a lot of internal resources and creating a lack of trust in the data. Live inventory was a big piece of what our system should have been able to do but wasn’t. We sell products, so knowing how many of them you have is kind of an important piece of the sales process.”

Cost was the second major issue that ChicoBag & To-Go Ware faced with Salesforce and the several other platforms it was using. Maintaining a suite of disconnected software ended up being a bigger expense than ChicoBag & To-Go Ware was initially anticipating. This high price point didn’t feel sustainable in the long term.

“All those systems were quite expensive, especially compared to Odoo as an investment.”

Sierra Brodleit - President of ChicoBag & To-Go Ware

A crossroads came into play when it was time for ChicoBag & To-Go Ware to upgrade Kenandy ERP to its newest version. At this time, Kenandy was getting ready to sell its company, opening up the possibility of instability. This made ChicoBag & To-Go Ware reevaluate its business software situation. Sierra explains:

“We realized, ‘Everything is going to break if we upgrade, and we’re going to have to rebuild it. We might as well rebuild with a system that is different.’ We didn’t see the point of continuing to use a system that was expensive and clunky. So we started to evaluate options.”

 Sierra Brodleit     President of ChicoBag & To-Go Ware

ChicoBag & To-Go Ware considered Netsuite and SAP in addition to Odoo, trying to find the solution that would best fit their needs at that time and moving forward. The company ultimately decided to go with Odoo because of its all-encompassing integration and affordable price point. Sierra details why her time at ChicoBag & To-Go Ware made her confident that Odoo would be the right choice:

“I really pushed for it because it’s one system with everything in it. It was designed to be simple. I’ve been with the company for sixteen years or so now, and I had been in a marketing role, an operations role, and was in a finance role at that point in time, and so I had seen all the sides and had to work to connect all the systems at one point or another during my career. And so, it simplified things, and I knew it would force us to simplify our process, which was just an added benefit.”

Sierra says that while there was a hiccup or two with the company’s implementation—such as being forced to change consultants halfway through—the migrating to Odoo was relatively smooth. ChicoBag & To-Go Ware officially went live with Odoo in 2022.

How Odoo streamlined ChicoBag & To-Go Ware’s sustainable mission

In ChicoBag & To-Go Ware’s two-year journey with Odoo, the software has made a tremendous impact on the company’s daily operations. Sierra reflects on the four main positives that Odoo has provided ChicoBag & To-Go Ware: better accounting processes, company-wide ease of access to information, cost, and time. 

Sierra explains that ChicoBag & To-Go Ware sells a lot of custom products. For these products, customers pay a deposit before paying the full purchase amount. With the company’s old suite of systems, the accounting team had difficulty managing deposits paid by customers. Odoo, on the other hand, has made this process much easier and more efficient:

“The way our old system was made that really hard for accounting to keep track of and reconcile and invoice. Out of the box, Odoo could handle the deposit process. So, the accounting team loves it the most.” 

Odoo has also provided all employees at ChicoBag & To-Go Ware with the ability to access important company information easily. For example, Sierra says that it’s “been huge” for employees to be able to see live inventory counts within one system rather than needing a different user license to access inventory on a different platform. For all teams in general, this accessibility provided by Odoo has saved time and effort:

“Odoo has allowed for salespeople, marketing people, everyone, really, to find information themselves rather than having to ask just one person who knew how to navigate the system to get them something.”

Sierra Brodleit President of ChicoBag & To-Go Ware

Making things easier and saving time while carrying out workflows has been a theme in ChicoBag & To-Go Ware’s journey with Odoo. For Sierra, who doesn’t have much website design experience, Odoo’s Website application has made designing and editing the company’s website a lot more intuitive. Features such as the drag-and-drop building blocks made it so that pretty much anyone at the company would have the skills to work on the website.

“The website builder, I personally think, it’s a lot easier because you can just edit and save, and it’s there. There are no branches or trees or check-in check-out processes. I’m not terribly tech savvy when it comes to web stuff, but in the past, making updates to a website seemed to require technical skills, and this doesn’t. So we have a lot more people able to work with the tools than in the past.”

In addition to website editing being a much faster process with Odoo, actions such as inputting orders and running reports have also been exponentially more efficient. Sierra discusses the time she feels is saved with Odoo’s software:

“It used to take upwards of ten minutes to put an order in our system, and now you can do it in less than one if you know what you want. So that is a giant savings if you consider every order that goes in– it’s 90% more efficient.”

Reporting has also been an area where time is significantly saved with Odoo, especially compared to the multiple steps required to create and analyze a report in the company’s previous system. Rather than needing to export and move data across unconnected platforms, Odoo’s all-in-one, integrated ERP makes this process seamless. Sierra notes that ChicoBag & To-Go Ware runs hundreds of reports a month and, therefore, likely saves hundreds of minutes each month with Odoo’s reporting capabilities.

“Running financial reports and comparisons– that saves a lot of time. The built-in pivot table within the reporting saves a ton of time just not exporting spreadsheets and manipulating them elsewhere. You can just see what you need within the system and not have to have Excel skills.”

Sierra also highlights the significant difference between what ChicoBag & To-Go Ware spends on software now with Odoo and its old suite of platforms. Expenses had previously been a pain point for the company with Salesforce, Kenandy, and Parfot. Odoo has offered a much more affordable option that allows the company to funnel saved money back into what really matters—the business.

“From a budget standpoint, we’re spending thousands of dollars versus tens of thousands of dollars.”

The mission of environmental sustainability and imparting good into the world is an all-encompassing task, and it is important for ChicoBag Company to focus all of its attention on this cause. With Odoo, time, manpower, and resources have been saved rather than wasted on administrative, back-end workflows. Thanks to Odoo, ChicoBag & To-Go Ware can dedicate everything to changing the world– one reusable bag at a time.

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