Rags2Riches Broadens Distribution and Social Impact in the Philippines

At NetSuite.org, the corporate citizenship arm of NetSuite, we support charities and social enterprises all over the world. Through our combination of product donations and discounts, pro bono services from our employee “SuiteVolunteers” and social solutions, we help solve complex back-office issues that limit these organizations’ social impact.

With more than 350 grantee organizations, we see a wide range of ways that charities and social enterprises use the NetSuite platform, often mirroring our commercial customers. Most organizations start with a critical business need such as financials, CRM, or ecommerce and over time expand their use of NetSuite to transform operations in multiple areas.

We have grantees that use NetSuite for ecommerce to sell items they create or to take donations online. Some organizations manage their donor interactions through NetSuite, tracking incoming contributions and ensuring that the funds donated are allocated to the best projects. Others use NetSuite to record, measure, and monitor their constituent interactions.

Eco-Ethical Manufacturing and Distribution
Among the organizations using NetSuite for manufacturing and wholesale distribution is Rags2Riches (www.rags2riches.ph), a social enterprise based in Manila, Philippines, that provides economically disadvantaged artisans (mostly women) with a market to sell their goods. Rags2Riches’ philosophy stands upon its four bottom lines: People, Profit, Planet, and Positive Influence.

Their eco-ethical business model originated in 2007 in Payatas, one of the Philippines’ largest dumpsites and home to 12,000 families. An informal handicraft cottage industry grew among the many women who developed a means to earn a living by scavenging scraps of fabric to weave into rugs and other items while taking care of their children at home.

Rags2Riches was created to provide these women with fair access, as well as with additional skills-based, financial and health training so they can maximize their career potential and take steps towards long-term financial and personal well-being. Rags2Riches integrated a design solution by partnering with well-known local fashion designers including Rajo Laurel, Amina Aranaz-Alunan, and Oliver Tolentino to turn these rags into fashion handbags.

Artisan Community Grows Nearly 3x
Rags2Riches is realizing rapid growth and better fulfilling its mission since implementing NetSuite to run core business processes in 2012 under the NetSuite.org program. NetSuite is providing Rags2Riches with real-time business management for distribution, financials, ecommerce, and inventory management, while enabling anywhere, anytime access to critical business information.

The greater efficiency and visibility into financials, production, and sales that Rags2Riches has achieved since abandoning on-premise software and manual paper-based processes has helped the social enterprise grow its artisan community from 300 to 800 between 2011 and 2012, while increasing its full-time staff from nine to 25 and growing revenue by more than 150 percent. With its success, Rags2Riches is also able to provide its partner artisans, living and working in poor communities in the metro Manila area and across the Philippines, with financial, health, and life skills training.

“NetSuite has been a big part of the Rags2Riches effort to help our artisans lift themselves and their families out of poverty. NetSuite is more than just a tool—they are a genuine partner and like family as they help us to better understand how we are doing with sales and expenses while making our operation more effective to serve people,” says Reese Fernandez-Ruiz, Rags2Riches founder and CEO and one of the five inaugural Rolex Young Laureates selected by the Rolex Foundation in Switzerland in recognition of her work.

Building on Success
As in the case for many NetSuite.org grantees, Rags2Riches is expanding on its solid foundation in the NetSuite cloud with a Phase II implementation in partnership with Manila-based CloudTech, a NetSuite Solution Provider Program partner. In this next phase, the organization will link its ecommerce webstore to NetSuite for more efficient order management, fulfillment, and automated reconciliation of ecommerce sales with financials.

“Our goal is an end-to-end process from buying raw materials to finished goods this completely integrated and available in a single solution, helping us reduce costs and increase efficiency,” says Fernandez-Ruiz.

Through grantees like Rags2Riches, we are better able to understand how NetSuite can help our social enterprise, B Corporation, and charity customers around the world, especially those with complex distribution models that move a large amount of product in a global marketplace.

For more information about the NetSuite.org Corporate Citizenship Program go to www.netsuite.org.