For years, Pom Pom at Home tracked its inventory the old-school way: One warehouse employee mostly knew where everything was. Sam Leiaghat’s parents launched the California bedding brand in 2007 as an offshoot of their antique business. His mom’s unpressed, lived-in linen look got the brand into Neiman Marcus while it was still small.
As website sales took off, the gaps in that system got harder to ignore. Sam is now CEO. In 2020, he brought in NetSuite and a warehouse management system, and since then the data has shaped what the brand stops selling, what it builds out, and how much new tech the team can take on. Here, he shares what to track from day one, how to tell a weak category from an understocked one, and how he leaves room for his mom’s creative vision alongside the numbers.
On the website growth that exposed an inventory problem:
We’re still heavily on the wholesale side. We’re in Bloomingdale’s, online and in store, and we’ve been selling to Nordstrom for a while. Now we’re going into Nordstrom stores, which is so exciting. But the website is about 30% to 40% of the business now, and the retail side has been exploding.
It was such a small side thing when we started. It was just, “Let’s have a website and show our customers the aesthetic of the brand.” Then it slowly kept growing and growing.
That completely changed how much we depend on tech. If the website is a big driver of sales, the tech behind it has to be great too. You have your Nordstrom anniversary sale and things might sell out, and then people are buying them on your website, but you don’t have them anymore. Selling things that were out of stock was a huge issue. It was a disaster for a while.
On the warehouse that ran on one person’s memory:
Before 2020, it was a very old-school system. One guy in the warehouse kind of knew where everything was. You’d ask him, and he’d say, “I think it’s in the back on the right.” If he was out sick, it was not good.
At the time, we didn’t see it as an issue. We did an inventory count a couple times a year, but things get moved around. A box might say there are 40 pillows in it, you open it, and there are 37. It was constantly causing issues, and we didn’t realize how big they were until we brought in the warehouse management system.
Now everything’s scanned in and out. We know exactly where in the warehouse something is, down to the shelf. Once we had it, we didn’t understand how we’d survived before. If we’d done it five years earlier, or eight, it would’ve been a huge leap. The moment we implemented it, the company just took off.
On what to set up from day one:
If it’s an inventory business, I would immediately look at how to observe and collect data on that inventory.
NetSuite is a big program, and I don’t think a startup needs it right away. It’s a large upfront cost, and you can probably get away with QuickBooks, which has grown so much since we started. Shopify also has so much more data now than it did back then. When you get to the point where you want to move to NetSuite or something similar, definitely do that.
Either way, you have to know your data and see what’s going on with your product. For a while, we brought in collections that we thought were doing great. Then we sat down and looked at the numbers, and they weren’t.
On the tech rollout that overwhelmed his team:
I get very excited about tech. It’s almost like a kid walking into a toy store with all these shiny things. There are so many apps. This company can do this, that one can do that, and I want it all.
We’d just had this great moment opening our own showrooms, so I thought, now I’m going to bring in all these fun tech gadgets. I wanted an online catalog and a print catalog. I wanted all the bells and whistles for our Shopify site and all the programs. Some of it worked and was great for the company. Some of it was just so much weight. People were stuck on long, draining tasks that weren’t producing the way I’d thought they would.
The team got overwhelmed, and they told me, “This is a lot to bring on at once.” That feedback is so important. So we went back and asked what was actually needed. Now we focus on that, then bring in one or two fun things on the side, not 20.
On the rug line that lost to half a rack of bedding:
We had rugs for about two years, and they took up a huge portion of our warehouse. We were like, “This is so great. We’re getting into the rug business. This is so cool.”
Then we looked at the numbers. The rugs took up multiple racks, and some of our bedding collections were outselling them on about half a rack. We’d been thinking about really expanding into rugs, and instead we said, "No, let’s just keep to the core." The data was showing that we’re good at bedding, so we decided to focus on that.
We’ve always had temptations. Bath has been a huge one for many years. But our goal is to stick to what we’re good at and what we know, and that’s bedding.
On asking whether a weak category is underperforming or understocked:
About five years ago, sheets were a small part of our business. We had one collection, a linen collection in white and flax, and everything else was duvets, pillows, all that. The sheets never did well, so we never invested in them.
Then at a trade show, I watched people come to our booth, get the bedding, and walk over to competitors to get their sheets. I said, “I don’t think our sheets are selling badly. I think we just don’t have any sheets for people to buy.”
So we built it out. We’ve added multiple types of sheets, and they’re now one of our top-selling collections.
Now, when a collection is doing badly, the question is: Are we lacking in it, or is it just not doing well? With sheets, we were severely lacking. These days, I’ll throw the spreadsheets into AI instead of going over them again and again, and we have a data team now, which has been really nice. It all comes back to understanding what’s going on with your current line.
On leaving room for his mom’s vision:
I’m very lucky that our creative director is my mom, and she’s so into bringing out her vision. We’ll bring out the necessary stuff that we need, and then we’ll also bring out more of her vision to keep that growing.
Her vision is why we’re different. We never ironed or pressed our sheets. They go straight out of the wash onto the bed, because the bed should look like you want to jump into it right away. We’ve never chased the trend, and even if people hadn’t received it well, she wouldn’t have changed her look. I think that’s helped us stay around for 20 years.
There’s still a lot of room to grow, especially on our website. The scary part is wanting to do so much that you lose your identity. So anything new has to stay within the Pom Pom at Home look we’ve kept for 20 years.
Listen to the full Shopify Masters interview to hear Sam explain how waiting by the bed all day got Pom Pom at Home into Neiman Marcus, why he settled who makes the big calls before taking over from his parents, and what happened when the brand left the showrooms it had used for 17 years.
