Business Funding Case Study
The Challenge
Established in 2017 as the UAE’s first premium sports apparel brand, SQUATWOLF has grown into one of the Middle East’s most recognizable gym gear brands. With customers in over 120 countries, SQUATWOLF has managed to grow its customer base year-on-year by offering high-quality products at competitive price points.
Despite SQUATWOLF being an e-commerce platform, the company still felt the impact of the pandemic. The majority of its manufacturing is done in Asia, so its supply chain was heavily impacted due to the lockdown in early 2020.
The company had a delayed and unreliable supply chain, yet customers were still coming to the site to buy their gym gear. This caused SQUATWOLF’s biggest challenge to be maintaining and ordering inventory at scale to cater to the market demand as the brand was growing in popularity.
What Beehive did
Beehive worked with SQUATWOLF to fully understand its business needs in order to follow the market’s peaks and troughs, to be prepared with inventory when it’s needed, and support its growth throughout the calendar year. Beehive offered Business Funding which is a flexible SME business loan which can be repaid over 6-36 months, providing the company with reliable finance and a pool of cash that can support working capital when it’s needed.
The result
SQUATWOLF was able to raise funds to restock faster and launch new styles as planned. The company recovered immensely when China reopened and managed to turn the business around from May 2020 to December 2020 and close the year over budget. They have now diversified production sources to multiple regions to hedge against the risk of another lockdown in Asia.
– Wajdan Gul, Co-Founder and CEO, SQUATWOLF
