How a holistic ERP system transformed Charriol’s luxury business in less than 6 months

Who's who?

Charriol is a Geneva-based Swiss watchmaker and luxury retailer known for its high-end watches, jewelry, and accessories, blending Swiss precision with bold design.

Challenge

As Charriol prepared to scale, its legacy ERP became a major bottleneck. High licensing and development costs, combined with limited integration capabilities, made growth both costly and slow.

Action Plan

After aligning on clear objectives with Charriol’s management, we ran interviews and mapped workflows. Three fast-paced iterations followed, each shaped by how the business actually operates.

The new ERP cut licensing costs by 50%, eliminated the need for one FTE, introduced real-time decision making, and boosted e-commerce performance. The system is now built to keep pace with Charriol’s accelerating growth.

Challenge

What happens when your business is gaining traction but your operational systems are holding you back? The answer: a lot of frustration. Charriol found itself in this exact situation in the summer of 2023.

Over time, the bottlenecks became clear:

High licensing and development costs were a problem.
Integration with external tools like e-commerce and after-sales systems was not possible.
Lack of real-time dashboards stood in the way of informed, timely decisions throughout the company.

In short, costly operations, inefficient processes, and limited insight into key data points made the business hard to scale.

Action Plan

So how did we replace an entire ERP in just six months?

Every project like this starts with creating clarity. Together with Charriol’s COO, we defined the project roadmap and key milestones from the start.

Next came an in-depth business analysis. We interviewed stakeholders across the company, mapped workflows (BPMN-style), and built interactive prototypes to test and refine ideas early.
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Armed with these insights, we executed the implementation in three fast-paced iterations. After each iteration, we gathered feedback and refined the system to ensure it fit Charriol’s workflows.

This was all part of our Accelerated Build Track™, a proven framework designed specifically for rapid, high-impact ERP transformations. Building the ERP using the ABT framework brought three key benefits:

Flexibility to design the system around Charriol’s data and way of working.
More time with end-users to build exactly what they needed.
Fast iteration based on real feedback was possible thanks to Airtable’s no-code platform.

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Result

The result is a fully custom, holistic ERP system now used throughout Charriol’s organization. Now let’s talk impact and ROI.

Cost savings:
Charriol reduced software licensing costs by 50% compared to the previous system. Increased efficiency also meant the sales team absorbed the workload of one full-time employee. With Swiss salaries averaging over 80K CHF, that’s a direct savings and clear productivity gain from day one.
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Real-time insights:
Every department now works with live dashboards instead of static spreadsheets. That means less hours spent exporting, cleaning, and merging data, conservatively saving 4 hours per department, per week. Across 5 major departments, that’s over 1,000 hours reclaimed annually. Less time spent on manual reporting, more time available on work that moves the business forward.
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Integrated e-commerce boost:
The ERP is now fully connected to Charriol’s Shopify store, giving teams real-time visibility into inventory. This reduced stockouts, improved order accuracy, and ensured product information stays consistent across platforms. The result: a 10% increase in order fulfillment and a 5% lift in online revenue, driven by fewer lost sales and more reliable inventory management.

And our work didn’t stop at launch; we continue to provide long-term support and continuous improvements, ensuring the ERP evolves with Charriol’s needs. Thanks to the ERP's newly found flexibility, we launched their operational U.S. infrastructure just four weeks after kickoff. No bottlenecks or months-long dev cycles.
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In the end, Charriol’s new ERP improved operations, reduced costs, and gave every department the insights they need to make smarter decisions. The new ERP is more than a software upgrade. Charriol now has a flexible system designed to keep up with their ambitions and support the business as it grows.