Performance sportswear brand, Castore, has improved pricing speed and accuracy with an integration from Patchworks, delivering greater agility and precision across pricing, promotions and product data.

Historically, pricing at Castore was manually prepared by its merchandising teams – a process that was not only time intensive but was also creating an operational burden, causing system friction and slowdown for its wider teams.

“We were in a place where a 30-35% [pricing] error rate was considered acceptable simply because the process was so long and manual,” said Andy Richley, Head of Tech at Castore. “When you are spending most of the night just trying to get pricing through, you stop asking whether the process itself makes sense.”

With 35 Shopify stores running simultaneously across international markets, Castore not only operates with a high SKU turnover but also experiences significant seasonality and promotional pressure, putting extra focus on pricing accuracy, especially during peak trading periods. 

“Like many fast-growing retailers, Castore had gradually pushed more execution workloads into its core systems of record,” Jim Herbert, CEO of Patchworks, said. “Pricing data was being validated, transported and executed through the same platforms, creating unnecessary coupling and exposing peak trading operations to risk.”

Castore sought to restructure how pricing data flowed through its retail architecture, and deployed Patchworks’ Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS) solution. This reduced pricing execution times from hours to minutes, while also cutting pricing errors by more than 90%, helping stabilise peak trading operations without adding system strain.

“By separating pricing governance from pricing execution, Castore was able to leave its core systems doing what they do best, while moving high-volume data movement and orchestration into a retail-first iPaaS,” Herbert added.