Every season has a new drop. Not every stack can keep up.

How Tony Bianco replaced a manual, error-prone preorder process with the Submarine preorder app built for the real complexity of fashion at scale.

1,720+

campaigns running

10+hrs

saved per week

Operating at enterprise scale across Australian and US storefronts

Tony Bianco is one of Australia's most recognised footwear brands, known for seasonal collections, trend-driven design and a loyal customer base.
Migrating to Shopify gave Tony Bianco the chance to rethink their preorder infrastructure from the ground up.
‍
Fashion preorders look simple from the outside - in practice, for brands operating at Tony Bianco's scale they are far more involved. They needed a solution that could handle:

‍
- Multiple purchase orders per product
- Constantly changing delivery dates
- Separate inventory pools for each storefront
- Ship-from-store complexity across their retail network
- Preorder items excluded from in-store pickup
- Operational reporting for real inventory visibility

Most preorder apps are built for straightforward use cases. Tony Bianco needed a solution that could function as genuine supply chain infrastructure.

Preorders at scale

Getting Tony Bianco's preorder program running at the scale they needed required solving four distinct operational problems: preorder campaigns at scale, bulk campaign management, variant-level stock control, and a clean integration with Tony Bianco's ERP.

Preorders at
enterprise scale

Bulk campaign management

Variant-level
stock visibility

ERP-compatible fulfilments

SCALING CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT

Purchase order driven
campaigns at scale

Tony Bianco runs preorders across dozens of styles simultaneously, with each style often tied to multiple purchase orders arriving at different times. Each PO needed its own campaign, its own customer-facing messaging, and its own fulfilment window, managed across both AU and US storefronts.

Submarine's functionality became the backbone of Tony Bianco's preorder operation. Using Submarine's PO upload tool, the team creates and manages campaigns in bulk. Each campaign is tied to a specific delivery date, stock limit and customer messaging, linked with the specific purchase order it came from. With 1,720+ campaigns running simultaneously across both storefronts, this scale is genuinely uncommon in the category.

Each campaign surfaces its own messaging, units available and delivery date to customers on the product page and at checkout. What previously required manual entry one campaign at a time now runs through a bulk upload process that scales with the business rather than against it.

"Submarine has completely transformed how we manage pre-orders. Previously our team were manually entering pre-order quantities one at a time with no ability to run multiple pre-orders simultaneously, a process that consumed over 10 hours a week in stock management alone."

Maddison Cramer

Head of Digital and eCommerce,
Tony Bianco

SELF-SERVICE EXPERIENCE

Bulk campaign management and PO updates

Purchase order schedules at Tony Bianco are updated at least weekly. With hundreds of active campaigns running at any time, updating dates and messaging one campaign at a time meant hours of manual work and a real risk of error.

Submarine's upload logic allows the team to re-upload a PO file and update campaign-level data including dates and messaging across all affected campaigns in one action, without interfering with existing orders or sold quantities.

Weekly schedule changes that previously consumed hours of manual work now happen in bulk. The process is faster, more accurate and no longer a bottleneck that slows the team down every time a PO shifts.

API-FIRST ARCHITECTURE

Inventory intelligence via metafields

The team needed a clear view of remaining inventory across every active campaign, broken down by size and style, for both customer-facing product pages and internal reporting. Off-the-shelf preorder tooling doesn't typically offer this level of granularity.

Submarine writes key campaign data, including units remaining per variant, purchase order references and campaign messaging to metafields at the product level. That data is consumed directly by Tony Bianco's theme and internal reporting workflows.

With per-size visibility on remaining preorder inventory across every active campaign, the team can see exactly where they stand at any point without pulling data manually. Customer-facing pages stay accurate and internal planning becomes more reliable.

ERP-compatible fulfilments

ERP-compatible fulfilment flow

Tony Bianco's fulfilment runs through Apparel 21, synced to Shopify via a connector. Submarine's preorder logic and the ERP integration were stepping on each other, causing the connector to fail when pushing fulfilment status back to Shopify. The result was a conflict that required manual intervention to resolve every time it occurred.

with A Shopify Flow trigger releases the fulfilment hold on order creation. From there, both Submarine's preorder logic and the Apparel 21 integration run cleanly, no manual intervention required.

The preorder program and the ERP now operate in sync rather than in conflict. Fulfilment flows through Apparel 21 cleanly, without errors or manual workarounds.

Scaling presales without the manual workload

Moving from manual campaign management to Submarine's bulk upload infrastructure gave the team back over 10 hours every week. Today, 1,720+ campaigns run simultaneously across AU and US storefronts - at a scale the old process could never have supported.
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- Preorder stock stays out of in-store pickup, so no oversells
- PO dates and messaging update in bulk
- Fulfilment flows automatically straight to Apparel 21
- A single source of truth powers both storefront content and internal reporting

"Submarine has completely transformed how we manage pre-orders. Previously our team were manually entering pre-order quantities one at a time with no ability to run multiple orders simultaneously, a process that consumed over 10 hours a week in stock management alone. Since switching to Submarine, we can bulk upload purchase orders with accurate delivery timelines and quantity limits, and the automatic cycling to the next purchase order once one sells through has been a game changer."

Maddison Cramer

Head of Digital and eCommerce, Tony Bianco

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