Propper Case Study

Propper is a 50 year-old manufacturer of military, law enforcement and tactical gear and apparel that was founded in 1967 by William S. Propper. The “Dixie Cup”, the white sailor caps, was the first product manufactured at Propper for the U.S. Navy. Propper has manufactur4ed over 60 million garments for the United State Department of Defense: Air Force, Navy, Marine Corp, Coast Guard, Special Forces and Army.

Propper was in search of designing a gateway for their dealers via their direct consumer site to purchase items and needed to seek out an Infor M3 partner that would link Magento, which was their CMS and Infor M3 ERP.

Propper has been working with LeanSwift for a total of 4 years. 2 years ago, Propper upgraded to the latest LeanSwift module as well as the latest Infor M3 version. Just recently, over 10 months ago, Propper, with the help of LeanSwift, upgraded their Magento Content Management System and this amounted to a complete re-platforming of Magento; building from the ground up a whole new infrastructure – everything needed to go from the previous environment of Magento 1.14.
There were several parties involved in getting this project underway. Propper had an internal Infor M3 resources they consulted with along with the IT, Marketing, Finance and Customer Service departments. Each department was involved in the testing and go-live phases of the Magento upgrade project.

The only challenges cited were working under a new environment, but once mapping was understood by all parties who were using Magento and getting familiar with it, the product met all expectations.

The upgrade and the connection between Infor M3 ERP and the Magento CMS offered automation capabilities for Propper that were key to high efficiency and growth. This allowed Propper to add, enhance and create a user-experience (UX) upfront for their direct consumer business and dealer business which allowed for the customer service department to not have to manually touch orders. This then allows the orders to end up in the distribution centers to pick, pack and ship without having the need for that manual intervention. The other aspect of growth and working with LeanSwift was the mapping of pushing products upstream. Working with LeanSwift middleware has allowed Propper to send their product data upstream to Amazon, Ebay, Walmart and soon into a Google Marketplace

Propper is currently being operated on the newest and latest versions of Magento, Infor M3 and LeanSwift module platform. From 2016-2017, Propper had a 137% growth in transactions on the B2C site, and this year, Propper has a trending growth of 50% in transactions already. Propper has grown 40% YoY over the last 3 years. The infrastructure and ecosystem of the Magneto CMS in place has allowed for transactional efficiency and stability to help Propper continue to grow.

To learn more about eCommerce Solutions, check out our Ultimate Guide to B2B eCommerce