A few years ago, a call came in from Rio Verti.
It’s a family-owned Italian outerwear brand, founded in 1989 in Florence. About 50 people on the payroll. Heavy down jackets built for Canadian winters and Scandinavian coasts. The kind of coat you bet your fingers on.
My contact was on the brand side. Proud of the product. Quietly frustrated by the operation.
His problem was blunt:
- The company ran on paper.
- Orders came in by phone, email, factory visit.
- The catalogue lived in binders, spreadsheets, photocopied lookbooks.
- Nobody could say, in real time, what was in stock, what was promised, and what was still at the factory.
He wanted a B2B portal. Salesforce. Something buyers could log into.
The Challenge
We drove to the factory. Quiet hallways. Beautiful samples. Deeply analogue.
Binders lined the walls. Fabric swatches were stapled to index cards. The product manager walked us through the season with a printed lookbook and a spreadsheet that had been photocopied three times.
The variability was the killer. A single jacket was a whole family of SKUs:
- Up to 12 sizes.
- Up to 5 colours.
- Up to 7 trimming options.
Multiply that out and one style turned into hundreds of SKUs. Stretch it across the full range and the catalogue became a small data warehouse.
A few other things made this hard:
- No internal digital team. Every tool we introduced would be new.
- The product owner on the client side was brought in from outside, so there were real knowledge gaps early on.
- The portal had to speak multiple languages on day one. Customers were spread across Europe and beyond.
- The business runs heavily on back-orders. Jackets are promised months ahead of the cold season and delivered in waves. Fragmented delivery is the norm for this industry.
Where the Real Work Was
Rio Verti asked for a store. We had to explain, carefully, that a store on top of chaos is a louder version of chaos.
Before we wrote a line of portal code, two things had to be in place:
- A digital product catalogue. A single source of truth.
- A working order management process, even before any customer-facing portal.
Without those, the B2B store would be a shiny wrapper on a paper operation.
The Approach
We stuck to a rule the team lives by: make it small, deliver often.
Phase one. Catalogue digitisation.
We sat at the factory with the product team. We built an Excel sheet that captured every jacket, every size, every colour, every trim. Photos, codes, prices, seasons. Dozens of rows expanded into hundreds once we modelled the variants.
Then we loaded that Excel into Salesforce as products. For the first time, the catalogue existed as data.
Phase two. Order management, before any store.
We built a CRM layer with a CPQ interface for order creation. Salespeople logged into Salesforce, picked products from the clean catalogue, built quotes, confirmed orders.
At this stage, the portal was still out of scope. Sales reps handled the same orders they always had, on a backbone that finally knew what the company sold.
This phase ran for roughly a year. We watched how orders actually flowed. We collected real data: seasonality, size curves, colour preferences, trim combinations that sold, trim combinations that sat in the warehouse.
That year of internal use paid for the next phase.
Phase three. The B2B store.
With the catalogue modelled and the order process observed, we rolled out Salesforce B2B Commerce. Multi-language. Price books by market. Back-order logic that matched how Rio Verti actually ships.
The launch was rough. We ran 26 iterations against the store before it behaved the way buyers expected. Sizing tables, variant pickers, order cutoffs, confirmation emails. Every round caught something. Every round closed another gap.
The Stack
- Salesforce B2B Commerce for the buyer-facing portal.
- Salesforce Order Management for the back-order and fulfilment logic.
- Salesforce Sales Cloud as the CRM backbone, feeding reps, accounts, and the product catalogue.
The Shift
Halfway through, the project quietly changed shape.
Over time, the work moved out of pure software and into the way Rio Verti ran day to day. We spent as much time in the office as on the keyboard. How the product manager briefed the factory. How reps took an order. How stock got counted. How a back-order was explained to a customer in week 14 versus week 22.
That shift was where the real value showed up.
The Outcome
We delivered a fully working, customised Salesforce B2B Commerce portal, sitting on a digital catalogue that finally reflected the real product range.
The more important outcome was harder to demo. The Rio Verti team now understood their own operation as data. They could see the catalogue, the orders, the back-orders, the lag. They stopped needing us for routine decisions.
When we stepped back, they kept going. New seasons got modelled into the system without our help. Process tweaks happened in-house.
A project that began as a portal ended as a functioning digital muscle inside a family-owned manufacturer that had never had one.
The Lesson
The line we repeat to every outerwear, furniture, and manufacturing client we take on: the catalogue eats the portal.
Get your products into clean, structured data first. Run real orders through a clean CRM before you sell to customers through a B2B store. Then wire up the buyer-facing layer.
We shipped in small pieces. Catalogue. CRM with CPQ. Store. 26 iterations of the store after that. The final portal looked inevitable in hindsight. The sequence is what made it work.
Thanks for reading this far. If you run a manufacturing business that still lives on paper, the form below is the right place to start.
– Jeff.