How a Leading Branded Merchandise Firm Automates SKU, Inventory, and Syncs to One Source of Truth with Starter Stack AI
"Starter Stack AI is sort of like this hybrid approach between experts and AI, making it a little faster, but you still have expertise behind it. And you pay a flat fee. I'd rather do that than figure it out myself and have it go faster. Like, you know, MVP up in a week or two or three—that's music to my ears."
Tod Ellington
Chief Operating Officer
About Whitestone Branding
Whitestone branding is a large merchandise company that manufactures custom products for thousands of business across several hundred stores and multiple warehouses. Their problem is simple: rapid growth broke their operations. Every customer order had to be manually entered into four separate systems. This created constant chaos—inventory mismatches, lost orders, missing products, and staff spending entire days fixing spreadsheet errors instead of serving customers. Orders took nearly a month to deliver. Their infrastructure couldn't keep pace with their growth.
Here's what was happening every single day at Whitestone.
Someone would take an order. They'd enter it into Commonsku, their order management system. Then they'd enter the same information into their warehouse system. Then into QuickBooks. Then into Shopify. Four separate systems. Four chances to make a mistake.
And they made mistakes constantly.
A SKU would be wrong in one system. The inventory count would be different in another. An order would say it shipped, but the warehouse had no record. Products would get lost between supplier and warehouse. Nobody could see where anything actually was.
The team spent hours every day fixing errors. Updating spreadsheets. Calling suppliers. Tracking down lost orders. Smart people doing mindless work.
Purchase orders took 28 days on average. Nearly a month from order to delivery.
Their VP of Operations knew this couldn't continue. They were growing fast, but their systems were from another era. Every new client made the problem worse. Every new product added complexity. Every new warehouse increased the chaos.
They needed help.
Starter Stack didn't sell them software. They didn't hand over a platform and say "good luck."
They embedded themselves in Whitestone's operations and built a system that actually worked.
First, they connected everything. Commonsku, the warehouse system, QuickBooks, Shopify. One login. One dashboard. One source of truth.
Then they automated the brutal stuff. SKU generation. Data validation. Inventory tracking. Error logging. All the manual entry that was eating up hours every day.
They built AI agents to handle the repetitive work. But they kept humans in the loop. The agents would flag issues, suggest fixes, validate data. A person would approve. The system would execute.
Everything got logged. Every decision. Every change. Full audit trail. No black box.
And it all happened in weeks, not months. No ripping out old systems. No massive IT project. No six-month implementation timeline.
They started with one bottleneck. Proved it worked. Then expanded.
Before & After
Someone takes an order
They manually enter it into four different systems. The SKU is wrong in one place. Nobody notices for three days. The order gets delayed. A person spends an hour fixing it. This happens dozens of times per day.
The system validates it instantly. It syncs across all platforms in real time. If there's an issue, an alert fires immediately. A person reviews it. Fixes it in seconds. Move on.
A product ships from a supplier.
It arrives at a warehouse. Someone manually updates the inventory. Two days later, they realize the count is wrong. They have to reconcile four different systems to figure out what actually happened.
The system tracks it in real time. It updates inventory automatically across all platforms. Everyone sees the same numbers at the same time.
Leadership has no visibility.
They ask "Where's the Miller Industries order?" Someone has to check four systems, make phone calls, piece together the answer.
Leadership opens a dashboard. Every order. Every product. Every warehouse. Real-time status. One click.
Purchase orders went from 28.5 days to 12.4 days.
That's 56% faster.
And they didn't just get faster. They scaled capacity by 100x. They can now handle orders that would have collapsed the old system.
Think about what that means. The same team. The same warehouses. Processing dramatically more orders in half the time.
The team stopped fixing errors all day. They started doing strategic work. Planning. Optimizing. Building relationships with suppliers. The stuff that actually grows a business.
Mistakes dropped. Fulfillment became reliable. Clients got their orders faster. The operations team stopped firefighting.
And it happened in weeks.
Whitestone had the classic growth problem.
Their systems couldn't keep up. Manual work was crushing them. Errors were compounding. Smart people were wasting time on mindless tasks.
Starter Stack fixed it. Not with a platform. Not with a promise. With real work. Real integration. Real results.
56% faster cycles. 10x scaling capacity. Weeks to deployment.
That's transformation.