Saddleback Leather Company Finds More Than Just an Ecommerce Platform on BigCommerce

It takes a lot to fluster Tina Lytch. She’s a mom of 11 children (no, that’s not a typo). She’s IT Manager for Saddleback Leather Company, a global lifestyle and fashion brand. And she’s co-founder of Love 41, where 100% of the profits go to projects around the world to help those in need.

But five years ago, she was done with her ecommerce platform. 

“It pains me to think about how much time we spent on other platforms,” she said. “How much time we wasted, how hard it was for any department to do anything with them…the struggle was just constant.” 

Struggling to Find an Ecommerce Solution

As they grew, they moved around to a few different ecommerce platforms, finally landing on Magento. While the team hoped that it would solve many of the pain points they were feeling previously, they quickly learned that wouldn’t be the case.

“It just wasn’t user friendly,” Lytch said. “Nobody could do anything because we had to do so much else to the site.”

Dave Munson, Founder of Saddleback Leather Company, had his own problems with the platform. “We’d want to try something new on the site, and my team would come back saying ‘Maybe six months for implementation.’ What a drag,” he said. 

Finding More Than Just a Platform, But a Partner

Saddleback had to find a solution for their ecommerce woes.

“We looked at Shopify. We looked at Salesforce. We did a lot of research,” she explained. “We put together a list of everything we wanted our platform to do, most didn’t have enough options for us or our company was too big or too small. 

“The main thing we wanted was something that would work with Acumatica,” she continued. “We just switched to a new ERP and we wanted our new solution to fit with that. So when we found BigCommerce, it was a no brainer.” 

Switching to BigCommerce has proven to be a great choice for Lytch and her team. Now, instead of spending all day drowning in a pile of support tickets, she can empower the Saddleback team to use BigCommerce themselves and become self-sufficient. 

“Once we started using BigCommerce, I was able to train each department on how to use it, especially our marketing team,” she said. “They’ve been able to create all their own web pages, landing pages and product pages. It used to be that my team would have to do a lot of that work for them.”

The ease of use that BigCommerce offers has also helped her team become more efficient and agile. 

“We’ve been able to cut down and be way more efficient with less staff,” she explained. “We’ve been able to do a lot of training and have minimized the amount of tickets in our IT department. We just don’t need the same amount of people to run that side of our business anymore.”

But efficiency and ease of use are only part of the equation. Lytch is ecstatic that her business has found a true partner, not just another company that says goodbye after you sign a contract. 

“For the first time ever, I really feel like we have a partner for our business,” she said. “BigCommerce really is locking arms with us and saying ‘Let’s make you as successful as you can be.’ Our Customer Success Manager has brought us so many ideas that we would’ve never thought of. I’ve never had that before on any other platform.” 

The Final Word

With all of this efficiency, Lytch has been able to stop worrying about the present and start thinking about a future that is filled with opportunity. Saddleback and Love 41 have huge plans — the world’s first headquarters made entirely out of leather, partnerships with some of the world’s biggest brands, and more — and BigCommerce will be there to help facilitate their growing needs. 

“Now that we’re on BigCommerce, I feel like we can look at the bigger picture. Now that we’ve got everything up and running and people are actually able to use our platform, we can look at the future and see where we want to go. It feels really good to be in that position.”

Want to learn more about Saddleback Leather Company? Check out our case study to find out how they’ve used BigCommerce to expand and grow.