How did Plümo start preselling its collections with Fabrikatör and Shopify, after 28 years in fashion retail?

Before

The model described above has an operational cost. Popular styles sell out mid-season, and reordering them is not a warehouse transfer. It is a new production order with an independent maker, and the wait typically runs two to six weeks. Each new season is also bought ahead of when it can be sold.

Before mid-2026, the buys ran on spreadsheets. Building a reorder meant pulling sales and stock figures from different places, merging several sheets together, then adjusting quantities by hand against sell-through. It worked, but it was slow, it relied on whoever built the sheet knowing where everything lived, and it added up to hours every month spent assembling data before a single decision could be made.

In January 2026 the team was in the middle of migrating to Shopify. That migration was the digitalisation moment: the point where the storefront, the customer communication, and the inventory operation could either stay separate systems or become one connected stack. It forced the question on inventory too. Keep running the buys the old way on a new platform, or fix both at once.

Why Fabrikatör

Plümo looked at a number of tools, and the recurring problem was that none of them did everything in one place. The deciding feature was being able to run backorders tied directly to purchase orders. A separate pre-order app would have meant two disconnected systems, and for a small team, reconciling stock between them would have made everyday management harder, not easier. Fabrikatör keeps it in one place: the interface is simple to navigate, reports can be built and adapted down to product and variant level, and the purchase order system shows exactly what is remaining and what is still needed.

Backorders matter to Plümo because, with small artisan production runs, the calendar naturally has gaps between what customers want to buy and what has physically arrived: a new season sells before all deliveries land, and a strong style's second run takes weeks at the maker. Backorders turn those gaps into selling time. The shop keeps taking orders whether the stock has landed or not, the team keeps selling without interruption, and customers see a delivery date rather than a sold-out notice.

Fabrikatör being built for Shopify mattered as much as the feature list. It works inside the store Plümo was already building: it reads what sells directly from Shopify, shows the backorder option and delivery date on the product page, and updates stock the moment deliveries are checked in. For a team rebuilding its site, inventory planning became part of the migration rather than a second project after it.

They trialed on a development store in February, then went live with the new Shopify site in early June 2026, with backorders running on the storefront from launch day.

"Raising purchase orders and receiving stock is quick and straightforward." Plümo Ltd, Shopify App Store review, June 2026

How Plümo runs it now

The buying rhythm is weekly: small purchase orders, one per supplier per buy, raised steadily through the season rather than in big batches. Lead times per supplier live in Fabrikatör, so a knitwear order due in six weeks and a bag order due in two are planned on the same screen without separate tracking sheets.

Backorder is switched on for almost every PO at approval. The moment an order is confirmed with the maker, the quantities on it become sellable online with an expected date, so a style keeps taking orders whether the stock has landed or not. Customers waiting on a backorder get automated updates through the Klaviyo integration.

The stack has a clear division of labour. Shopify is the shop and the record of what sold. Klaviyo talks to customers. Fabrikatör sits between them and makes the inventory decisions: what to buy, when, and from whom, which styles can be sold before arrival, and what to tell waiting customers when a date moves. Shopify and Klaviyo carry those decisions out.

Seasonal reorders run through custom reports: the MD and lead buyer sorts by season tag and supplier to decide what gets a second production run, then raises the POs from the same view. Receiving is done in Fabrikatör when deliveries land, which updates Shopify stock and releases the linked backorders for fulfilment.

The assembly work from the spreadsheet days is gone. The team opens a dashboard and sees the figures straight away, and a custom report built by Fabrikatör brings everything they need into one view, with no merging of sheets before a decision can be made.

"For me, the biggest change is speed. I can pull the figures I need in minutes, especially now through the MCP, which frees up time to focus on improving the business rather than building reports." Lucy Martin, Ecommerce Manager, Plümo

The autumn collection launch was the system's real test: the new season went on sale with preselling live from day one. Those four weeks became the biggest backorder period of Plümo's year, bigger than the previous thirty weeks combined.

Shaping the product, not just using it

Plümo's team treats the platform as something they help build. In June, they hit a real edge case: returned units were staying counted against backorders and holding capacity that should have been free. Instead of just reporting it, the team sent over a mockup of the reconciliation view they wanted.

Within weeks the fix shipped: a way to release a backorder when the order has already been fulfilled from other stock. The team verified it in production the week it went live.

"A genuinely good product backed by a customer service team that's always willing to help and happy to take new ideas back to the wider team, who then look to integrate them." Plümo Ltd, Shopify App Store review, June 2026

Results in detail

The timing of Plümo's backorder sales tells the story. More than one fourth of the year's backorder revenue landed in the four weeks around the autumn collection launch. The launch spike is planned: the season is bought from independent makers ahead of time, put on sale the day it launches, and paid for by customers while the final deliveries are still arriving. The rest spreads across the year as strong styles keep selling through their reorder gaps.

Availability on the core range is managed the same way. Of the best sellers that were out of stock at the September snapshot, most already had replacement stock on order and on its way, and none of those deliveries were running late. The restock suggestions concentrate where they matter: the bulk of the suggested spend sits in the best-selling range.

The caveats, stated plainly: Plümo has been live since February 2026, so everything here covers 2026 only and there is no like-for-like baseline from the previous system. And as a seasonal fashion brand, Plümo deliberately lets past-season styles sell out for good, so raw out-of-stock counts say nothing useful about its planning, and we have not used them.

What's next

Next is Fabrikatör's MCP, a new connection that lets the team pull live Fabrikatör data straight into their other tools, with no exporting and reworking of files first. Plümo is now looking at where it can automate more of the day-to-day and speed up decisions, so the team spends less time gathering information and more time acting on it.