Three Stores, One Platform, Zero Manual Handoffs to the Print Floor
Parameter consolidated It Takes Two's three separate BigCommerce sites into a single Odoo-powered storefront and built a custom Fiery print integration that sends paid orders directly to production — no human in the loop.
The Situation
Three separate BigCommerce sites with no inventory synchronization. An order on one site didn't update stock on the other two, leading to overselling and manual corrections. Every order required a human to download it, print it, batch it with other orders, and physically deliver it to the production floor. During busy periods, orders backed up in inboxes for hours — sometimes days over weekends or holidays.
Customer experience was fracturing. Wholesale buyers and retail customers had completely different experiences on sites that were supposed to represent the same brand. Overselling eroded trust — particularly with wholesale accounts that depend on reliable fulfillment. The manual order-to-production pipeline was a bottleneck that capped throughput regardless of how many orders came in. And maintaining three separate BigCommerce subscriptions, three sets of product data, and three design templates was consuming budget and attention that a 12-person team couldn't spare.
BigCommerce apps for inventory sync between the three sites were tested but proved unreliable — sync delays of 15-30 minutes meant overselling still happened during high-traffic periods. The team also tried batching orders manually on a fixed schedule (twice daily) to reduce the chaos, but that just introduced predictable delays instead of random ones. A shared spreadsheet for cross-site inventory was attempted and abandoned within two weeks.
BigCommerce's multi-store capabilities weren't designed for true inventory unification — they're built for brands running different storefronts, not companies that need one source of truth. The sync tools were aftermarket add-ons working against the platform's architecture, not with it. And no amount of process improvement could fix the fundamental issue: three separate databases pretending to be one inventory. Manual batching reduced errors but added hours of latency that customers noticed.
It Takes Two is a greeting card and stationery publisher founded in 1984 in Le Sueur, MN, known for Georgia Rettmer's distinctive torn paper art style. They serve retail consumers, wholesale buyers, and specialized professional verticals including veterinary, hospice, real estate, funeral, and nonprofit organizations. The company manages 5,000+ SKUs and distributes internationally through retail, wholesale, catalogs, and Amazon.
~12 employees, 22,000 sq ft facility in Jacksonville (shared with sister company Wells & Drew), 5,000+ active SKUs across 50+ subcategories. A+ BBB rating. Serves retail, wholesale, and professional verticals domestically and internationally.
Three separate BigCommerce sites — ittakestwo.com (retail), ittakestwodirect.com (direct), ittwholesale.com (wholesale). No integration between them. Orders manually printed and physically delivered to production. Inventory tracked separately per site with periodic manual reconciliation.
Small team with no technical staff. Production handled by sister company Wells & Drew at a shared facility, so any solution had to bridge the gap between the ecommerce operation and an external print floor. The product catalog is enormous (5,000+ SKUs) with complex categorization across very different customer types. Budget had to cover consolidation, the new platform, and the print integration — not three separate projects.
Approach & Solution
Odoo offered genuine consolidation — one database, one product catalog, one inventory — with the flexibility to serve different customer types from the same platform. More critically, Odoo's open architecture made the custom Fiery print integration possible. BigCommerce couldn't connect to a print production system. Odoo could, because it was designed to be extended rather than just configured.
Keeping BigCommerce and investing in better sync tools was the lowest-effort option but didn't solve the underlying architecture problem. Shopify Plus was evaluated but its wholesale capabilities required third-party apps that introduced the same sync issues. WooCommerce was considered for flexibility but would have required significantly more custom development for the same result, and ongoing WordPress maintenance for a non-technical team was a concern.
Odoo's ecommerce templates required more design work than BigCommerce's polished out-of-the-box themes. The migration also meant a period where the team had to learn a new system while still processing orders — there's no way to avoid that. And the Fiery integration was entirely custom, meaning Parameter was building something nobody had built before. That carried development risk, but the operational upside was too significant to skip.
The migration had to happen without any order processing downtime — It Takes Two ships daily and seasonal demand doesn't wait for IT projects. The Fiery integration had to work with the existing print infrastructure at the Jacksonville facility (shared with Wells & Drew), not require new equipment. And the unified site had to serve three distinct customer types without making any of them feel like they were on the wrong website.
Merged three BigCommerce product catalogs into a single Odoo database. Rebuilt the product hierarchy with 50+ subcategories organized by use case and vertical. Mapped all existing URLs and implemented redirects for the retired domains.
Everything downstream depended on having one clean product catalog. You can't automate production if the system doesn't know what it's producing. The URL mapping preserved SEO equity accumulated across three domains over years.
Three separate BigCommerce product catalogs with manual data entry across each
Designed and built a single responsive storefront on Odoo using Bootstrap. Implemented customer-type-aware navigation and pricing — retail, direct, and wholesale buyers see appropriate catalogs and pricing from the same site.
The three-site model existed because different customer types needed different experiences. The unified site had to deliver that differentiation without fragmenting the backend. One site, one inventory, multiple experiences.
ittakestwo.com, ittakestwodirect.com, ittwholesale.com (three separate BigCommerce sites)
Built a custom integration between Odoo and the Fiery print management system. When a customer pays for an order, the system automatically generates and queues the corresponding print job — correct files, correct quantities, correct priority.
This was the highest-impact automation in the project. Manual order-to-production handoff was consuming hours daily and introducing errors weekly. Removing the human from that loop meant orders hit the press floor in minutes instead of hours.
Manual process: download order → print order sheet → batch with other orders → physically deliver to press floor → operator manually queues print job
Consolidated all inventory into Odoo with real-time stock tracking across all sales channels. Configured order workflows for retail, wholesale, and direct channels with appropriate fulfillment rules.
Overselling was the most visible symptom of the three-site problem. Real-time inventory from a single database eliminated it entirely. Different fulfillment rules per channel meant wholesale orders could batch while retail orders shipped individually.
Three disconnected inventory systems with manual reconciliation attempts
Ran parallel operations for four weeks, processing orders through both old and new systems. Migrated DNS for all three domains to the unified site. Monitored 301 redirects and search rankings for 60 days post-launch.
A hard cutover with 5,000+ SKUs and active daily orders was too risky. Parallel operations caught data inconsistencies before they became customer-facing problems. The 60-day monitoring period ensured the SEO transition didn't crater organic traffic.
Three separate domains and hosting configurations
Execution
The Fiery integration was built as a standalone Odoo module with its own error handling and retry logic — if the print system is busy or offline, jobs queue locally and retry rather than failing silently. Product images and print files were separated in the asset pipeline so the website serves optimized web images while Fiery receives high-resolution print files. The Bootstrap frontend was intentional over Odoo's default templates — faster load times and easier responsive tuning for a catalog this large.
The Fiery integration prototype worked on the first test run — a paid test order hit the print queue in under three minutes with the correct file and quantity. That moment changed the project from 'consolidation with a nice-to-have automation' to 'this automation is the entire point.' The second turning point was discovering that 23% of the wholesale product catalog had duplicate SKUs across the three sites with slightly different descriptions. Cleaning that up before migration prevented what would have been weeks of post-launch inventory confusion.
The three BigCommerce sites had diverged more than anyone realized. Products that were supposed to be identical across sites had different prices, different descriptions, and in some cases different images. The data reconciliation phase took nearly twice the estimated time. The Fiery integration also surfaced an issue with how certain multi-quantity orders were batched — the print system expected one job per unique product, but some orders contained the same product in different quantities for different recipients. Custom batching logic had to be written to handle that edge case.
It Takes Two started in 1984 when Georgia Rettmer, an artist known for her distinctive torn paper style, and Kimberly Rinehart, a writer, decided the greeting card industry needed something that didn’t come off a corporate assembly line. Forty years later, the company has 5,000+ SKUs, serves everyone from retail consumers to veterinary offices to funeral homes, and ships internationally through retail, wholesale, catalogs, and Amazon. Georgia passed away in December 2020, but her art remains the foundation of every product the company makes.
The operational reality, though, had gotten tangled. It Takes Two was running three separate BigCommerce sites — ittakestwo.com for retail, ittakestwodirect.com for direct sales, and ittwholesale.com for wholesale buyers. Three sites meant three product catalogs, three sets of inventory numbers, and three order management workflows that had nothing to do with each other. When a wholesale order came in on one site and depleted stock, the other two sites didn’t know. Overselling happened. Manual reconciliation happened more. And every single order, regardless of which site it came from, had to be manually handed off to production — printed, packaged, and shipped by the team at the Jacksonville facility shared with sister company Wells & Drew.
Parameter’s first move was consolidation. Three sites became one Odoo-powered storefront that serves all three audiences — retail, direct, and wholesale — with appropriate pricing and catalog visibility for each. The product hierarchy was rebuilt to handle 50+ subcategories spanning wildly different verticals without becoming a navigation nightmare. A Bootstrap responsive design kept the site lightweight and functional across devices, which matters when a hospice administrator is ordering sympathy cards from a tablet between patient visits.
The real unlock, though, was the Fiery integration. Parameter built a custom connection between Odoo and the Fiery print system so that when an order is paid, the print job is automatically created and queued. No one copies an order number onto a production sheet. No one walks a printout to the press operator. Payment triggers production. For a company processing hundreds of orders per week across 5,000+ SKUs, removing that manual handoff didn’t just save time — it eliminated an entire category of errors. Wrong quantities, missed items, orders sitting in someone’s inbox over a long weekend — gone.
The consolidation also solved a quieter problem: SEO and brand coherence. Three separate domains meant diluted authority and confused customers who weren’t sure which site to use. One domain with 700+ properly structured URLs, clean navigation, and unified branding made the company easier to find and easier to buy from. It’s the kind of change that doesn’t show up in a single metric but shows up everywhere over time.
Results
The most immediate change was the elimination of manual order handoff to production. Orders that used to sit in a queue waiting for a human to process them now reach the print floor in minutes. Inventory accuracy went from 'approximately correct most of the time' to real-time and reliable — overselling stopped completely. The team no longer maintains three sets of product data, three site designs, or three BigCommerce subscriptions. Customer service handles one system instead of checking three dashboards to find an order.
It Takes Two can now handle significantly higher order volume without adding staff — the bottleneck was never demand, it was processing capacity. The unified site improved wholesale buyer experience enough that several accounts increased their order frequency. Seasonal spikes (holidays, Mother's Day, sympathy card demand) no longer create the same operational crunch because orders process themselves. The company is also better positioned for growth into new verticals — adding a product category is one operation, not three.
We were running three websites and none of them talked to each other or to our print floor. Now an order comes in, payment clears, and the printer starts. I still walk over to check sometimes because I don't quite believe it.
Kimberly Rinehart, Owner, It Takes Two
Takeaways
Product companies running multiple storefronts that should be one. Publishers and manufacturers where the gap between 'order received' and 'production started' is measured in hours or days instead of minutes. Any operation where manual order handoff to a production system is the bottleneck — especially when that handoff involves printing, manufacturing, or physical production.
Multi-site consolidation delivers more value than expected because the hidden cost isn't the subscription fees — it's the time spent keeping separate systems approximately in sync. That time is invisible until it's gone. The second pattern: automating the order-to-production handoff has cascading effects. When production starts faster, shipping happens faster, customers receive orders faster, and reviews improve. One integration point improved the entire downstream experience.
When you're maintaining multiple storefronts for what is functionally one business. When your order-to-production handoff involves printing a piece of paper and walking it somewhere. When inventory discrepancies between channels are a recurring problem, not a one-time glitch. When your team spends more time moving data between systems than doing the work the data represents.
Platform consolidation, ecommerce build, custom Fiery print integration, inventory unification, domain migration, and ongoing site management. The Fiery integration was a fully custom build — no existing connector existed.
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