A Unique Party for Success

Hitesh has always had a passion for retailing. Working for a family run business with multiple discount stores in 2010, he saw an opportunity to launch his own business, Unique Party Shop.

Over the last 10 years, Hitesh has grown Unique Party Shop store’s to be the largest party supplier in Brisbane, and then in 2014 started selling online through a BigCommerce webstore, and then starting listing and selling via eBay and Catch.

Despite expanding online, Hitesh realised that the inefficiencies within his business were preventing real growth from happening. Using multiple systems it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain especially with over 10,000 SKUs. On top of this order fulfilment in their retail environment wasn’t working.

Consulting the experts

Thanks to a consultation with an ecommerce expert, Hitesh had an Ah-Ha! moment, realising that by moving his business to an all-in-one system like Neto, he could overcome these inefficiencies, improve his workflows and take the business national.

"The difference between an ecommerce consultant and a website designer, is that they look at your entire business, and give expert advice on how to improve your workflows, instead of just delivering a website and saying - bang there you go"
Hitesh Parmar, Founder, Unique Party Shop

Hitesh was excited to get started on this new opportunity, and after evaluating his business, he realised that he didn’t have the time or expertise in the company to manage the move to Neto. He knew that to grow nationally he would need to get help. Hitesh’s consultant put him in touch with Donohue Consultancy, certified Neto Partner, who could take care of the digital set up; moving the store’s data into Neto, setting up marketplace channels, connecting Neto to their accounting platform, Xero, as well as helping to optimise the business; advising on best practice workflows and warehouse setups.

Setting up systems and processes

When Unique Party Shop first contacted Donohue Consultancy, they were very excited about the chance to work with a company that was ready to scale their business. For Donohue Consultancy, the key to this project was being able to help Unique Party Shop optimise the new warehouse, so that processes were in place to help manage a successful ecommerce business - something that was lacking from the previous systems, and an area that Hitesh had no previous knowledge in.

"Running a retail shop is very different to a warehouse. Donohue Consultancy helped us through this transition and set up our warehouse to make the pick pack and dispatch process as efficient as possible"
Hitesh Parmar, Founder, Unique Party Shop.

The team also assisted Unique Party Shop by advising on placement of products in specific warehouse zones, setting up new pick and packing stations, optimising courier cage locations to speed up collection, and overhauling order processing workflows to factor in courier pick up times.

"Most clients will process orders in the order that they come in, however it is important to determine which orders need to go out first. With Neto you can easily group orders by couriers, and then pick these first, so you know that if you have a courier that arrives at 3pm, those orders are picked and packed first, before the orders by a courier who picks up at 5pm"
David Donohue, Director, Donohue Consulting

Now that proper systems and processes are in place, Hitesh is excited about what the next 12 months will bring. Since 2017 sales have increased by over 100%, and things don’t stop there. For the first time, Hitesh can see more potential from the ecommerce business than the physical retail store and plans to be the market leader in Australia within 2 years.

"Donohue have been amazing to work with, if there is a problem they just get the job done. They always delivered what they promised and they get things done straight away. The amazing thing about working with partners, is that I can use their expertise to get tasks done much quicker, and also make them accountable for their work and are focused on getting results"
Hitesh Parmar, Founder, Unique Party Shop.

Growing the business with partners

Hitesh is now expanding his ecommerce operations via a partner network to help manage other areas of the business, as it is much quicker to grow the business. Hitesh uses other partners to help with data product management, SEO, Google Ad words and continues to use Donohue Consultancy for ebay management, ensuring that he can achieve what he loves most: sourcing and selling products.