Boomi empowers Native Union ecommerce pivot

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Native Union was primarily a business-to-business company, but it was able to quickly embrace direct ecommerce with the help of Boomi. Native Union Chief Operating and Financial Officer Farouk Merzougui said unifying their myriad applications with the Boomi AtomSphere Platform gave them flexibility and scalability, enabling them to rapidly adapt to changing conditions.

“With our former infrastructure, we would have supported this expansion in a labor-intensive manner. We had an ecosystem of more than 10 different applications, none of it connected, and each business function was working in its own silo. We had low flexibility, poor scalability, and we could not draw on our data easily to make the right decisions. Previously, there was a huge amount of duplication across our teams. We felt beholden to our infrastructure,” Merzougui said in a press statement.

Choosing Boomi

Merzougui was one of the speakers at the Boomi Asia Pacific and Japan summit, which was fittingly called “Out of This World” because it was held virtually like most events this year.

Founded in Hong Kong in 2009, Native Union designs stylish technology accessories fashioned to empower the modern work-from-anywhere lifestyle. Boomi introduced Native Union as one of its new customers at “Out of this World”.

Merzougui said he selected Boomi because its low-code functionality meant the platform was simple to manage and would enable them to get to market faster without requiring additional technical resources.

“We wanted to connect the dots to our different applications in a simple and faster way. We did not want to be held hostage by development companies and programmers every time there was a new release,” he said.

Digital transformation journey

Native Union first embarked on a digital transformation strategy three years ago in order to automate business processes and improve efficiency. This was to gain the scalability required to pursue an ambitious growth and expansion strategy — a strategy that has now accelerated significantly.

“Our growth has doubled over the past six years. We currently supply to 100 countries, but we want to double that in the next 12 months,” Merzougui said.

“Technology was a critical part of our expansion goals. Before Boomi, my team was obliged to run repetitive, low-value tasks, spending 90 percent of their time on manual data entries, and only 10 percent on actual analysis. I wanted to invert that ratio. I wanted to create integrated experiences that would enable them to instantly connect to the apps and data they need to serve our customers,” he said.

Helping businesses adapt

With the help of Boomi, Native Union was able to automate its entire ecommerce business to seamlessly scale and support a double-digit growth in direct online sales stemming from the rise in remote work.

Boomi’s AtomSphere Platform has also empowered Native Union to instantly connect its staff to the digital assets they need, allowing them to spend more time on delivering business value, while Boomi’s automation capabilities enabled the fully-remote deployment of a new overseas fulfillment warehouse.

“Every business starts small, but no business wants to stay small,” said Lawrence Ng, General Manager South East Asia at Boomi.

“By harnessing the power of automation, Native Union has been able to not only rapidly adapt its business model in response to changing circumstances. It has been able to expand during what is the most challenging economic period of our time.”

“There are more than 340,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Hong Kong, making up 98 percent of the total private sector. SMEs will be critical to our post-pandemic economy. Native Union is a leading example of how technology can be leveraged to pivot, scale, and succeed,” Ng said.

Boomi, a Dell Technologies business, pioneered cloud-based integration platform-as-a-service. It powers the data economy by enabling organizations to instantly connect people to what they want.