Richloom Case Study
The fabric house that publishes its own catalog. A third-generation New York textile company founded in 1957, running BigCommerce sampling sites fed from its AS400 ERP since 2018, with no developer in the publishing loop.
Results & Impact
Richloom's sites take no payment, so the results here are about ownership and continuity rather than revenue. Every product, specification field, image and stock figure on the sites comes from files Richloom's own staff drop into a folder. ECommerce Partners has never been in the loop for a product update, and the storefront has gone through three platform generations without a relaunch.
Background
Richloom Fabrics Group was founded in New York in 1957 by Fred Richman with a $5,000 loan and began as a small fabric supplier. Nearly seventy years later it is a third-generation, family-owned textile and finished goods company: Fred's son Jim Richman joined in 1972 and has led it as CEO for more than 35 years, and Fred's grandson Michael Saivetz is President. It is still headquartered on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, with operations in North and South Carolina, Indiana and Shanghai, hundreds of employees worldwide and a global sourcing network behind its prints, wovens, decorative textiles, wallcoverings and finished goods.
The business sells into the upholstery, hospitality, decorative jobber, cruise, outdoor furniture, retail and RV markets. Richloom Contract serves hospitality, commercial and cruise interiors, where architects and designers specify fabric against flammability, abrasion and sustainability codes, so every product carries a long specification sheet and a sample has to be in hand before anything is ordered. Richloom lists OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certification on many of its textiles and has held MindClick Leader Status for hospitality since 2018, and one of its stated sustainability programs is a growing digital library that reduces reliance on physical sampling. The websites are where that program lives.
Richloom's product data lives in an AS400 ERP the business has run for decades, and that system, not the website, is where new collections, specifications and stock levels are born. In 2018 Richloom asked ECommerce Partners to build three BigCommerce storefronts, Richloom Contract, Richloom Group and Solarium, from one codebase and one data pipeline. The sites are sampling sites, not shops: a qualified designer orders memo samples, yard cuts or pieces at no charge, and the ERP fulfills them. The brief was that Richloom's own team, not an agency, should be able to publish the catalog, and that the ERP should stay the source of truth for everything. Today the two sites carry more than 6,000 products between them, and Solarium outdoor fabrics are published as a collection on richloom.com.
Key Challenges
- Sampling, Not Selling: Every order is a $0 sample order. Prices and billing had to come out of the cart and checkout, and the checkout had to ask for a FedEx or UPS account number for expedited shipping instead of a payment method.
- The Catalog Lives in the ERP: Products, dozens of specification fields, collection rules and stock all come from the AS400. The pipeline had to let Richloom's staff publish without a developer, and from 2024 it had to read a second ERP database of finished goods as well.
- Trade-Only Access Tiers: Approved customers order samples, a second tier sees hidden sampling products and can order yard cuts, hotel brands get a restricted page, and residential and non-approved sign-ups need different onboarding.
- Product Pages BigCommerce Could Not Render: Designers expect to see every colorway of a style, related fabrics from the same season and collection, measurements in both imperial and metric, ACT performance icons and a branded specification sheet they can download.
- Platform Limits: A maximum of 12 product filters, listing requests silently capped at 100 results, no shipping data on the order list page, and native inventory tracking that blocks a zero-stock fabric from being sampled.
Our Solution
- Built three BigCommerce storefronts from one codebase, each with its own app instance and sandbox, on top of ECX, our integration platform
- Designed a client-run publishing pipeline: Richloom drops a product file and a rules file from the ERP, ECX applies the rules and rebuilds every product, field, category, image and stock figure on each site
- Rebuilt the cart and checkout around $0 sample orders, with a carrier account number in place of payment and "Order Comments" relabeled as "Project Name"
- Built a storefront app per site for available colors, related fabrics, unit switching, ACT icons and server-generated PDFs: specification sheets, cart contents and project contents with each brand's own branding
- Turned wishlists into "Projects" that designers can name, share, email and download as branded PDFs
- Gated the catalog by customer group, with a webhook on group changes that drives the right Mailchimp onboarding journey for each tier
- Closed the loop with the ERP: orders out hourly with the sample type per line, shipments and tracking numbers in from the ERP, newly approved customers out daily
- Unified a second ERP database of finished goods into the same catalog in 2025, with their own fields, up to three images each, and sizes shown as "available colors" of the same style
- Moved stock levels into custom fields and switched native inventory tracking off, so a fabric at zero yards can still be sampled and old orders can be reordered
- Added a per-item shipments view to My Account, authenticated with BigCommerce's Current Customer token so a buyer sees only their own orders
- Upgraded the stack end to end without a relaunch: Laravel 5 to 10 to 12 with automated tests, ECX from .NET 5 to 9 to 10, and a monthly automated security update routine
How Richloom publishes its own catalog
Nobody at ECommerce Partners touches product data. When Richloom added leather with a new Dye Method field in October 2026, it did so with a rules file. The pipeline is extended only when a new field needs new behavior.
Drop two files
Richloom exports a product file and a rules file from the AS400 and drops them into an FTP folder. ECX polls the folder every 30 minutes.
Review the conversion file
ECX applies the rules, which decide which collection shows on which site, product type mapping, abrasion ranges, flammability and sustainability codes and tiering, then emails a conversion file to Richloom's team for review. The review step is a deliberate safety check.
Trigger the update
On Richloom's go-ahead, ECX creates or updates every product in BigCommerce: name, description, dozens of specification fields, categories, brands, search keywords, visibility, tier, sample sizes and images. A product with no image is set invisible rather than published blank.
Keep stock and orders moving
A separate inventory file carries stock levels, and since 2026 the next available quantity and date. Orders go back to the ERP every hour, shipments and tracking come in from the ERP, and newly approved trade customers go out daily.
Why we recommended BigCommerce
Most of our work is Shopify Plus, and we recommend it when it fits. Richloom is a trade sampling catalog, not a shop, and in 2018 that pointed at BigCommerce for reasons that still hold.
- Custom fields are native: Richloom's product pages carry dozens of specification fields written by the pipeline, shown by the theme and used for filtering. BigCommerce treats them as first-class catalog data; on Shopify at the time they would have been metafields with no admin interface and no filtering.
- Customer groups are built in: Approved Customers, Tier 2, Brand Access and Residential map directly onto BigCommerce customer groups, which decide which categories and products each buyer can see. Shopify had no equivalent short of tags and theme logic.
- A checkout you can take payment out of: every order is a $0 sample with a carrier account number in place of billing. BigCommerce let us remove price and payment from the cart and checkout and relabel its fields. Shopify's checkout could not be reshaped that far.
- Native wishlists and faceted search: "Projects" is built on BigCommerce's multiple named, shareable wishlists, and the filters that designers live in run on custom fields and brands. Shopify had neither a wishlist primitive nor filtering beyond tags.
- Pricing for a site that takes no money: Shopify Plus is priced for checkout and payment scale, which a sampling site never uses. A BigCommerce Enterprise contract priced against a trade-only catalog was the easier case to make.
- The client keeps its own hands on the theme: Richloom's web coordinator edits a Stencil theme in Bitbucket alongside us. Stencil is plain Node with a local dev server, which suited a client that wanted to own its front end.
Working around BigCommerce's limits
Eight years on one platform means meeting its limits. Each of these was solved without leaving BigCommerce.
12 product filters, maximum
BigCommerce caps faceted search at 12 filters with no plan to raise it. We rebuilt the filter set around the cap, then added a third-party filter app on Richloom Contract for the facets that did not fit.
An undocumented 100-result cap
In May 2026 search results started skipping products from page three: one request now returned at most 100 results, and BigCommerce support confirmed no documented change. We rewrote pagination to one request per page, then did it again when the same cap reached category pages in October.
Native inventory blocks sampling
Once stock was written to BigCommerce's inventory field, a fabric at zero yards could not be added to the cart as a sample and old orders could not be reordered. Stock moved to custom fields and tracking was switched off on every product.
No shipping data on the order list
The My Account order list exposes no shipment data, so our storefront app serves a per-item shipments view through its own endpoint, authenticated with the Current Customer token BigCommerce issues to the logged-in buyer.
No email on customer group change
Approving a trade account moves it between customer groups, and BigCommerce sends nothing when that happens. A webhook to our app now starts the right Mailchimp onboarding journey for each group.
Checkout labels cannot be edited
Designers need to tag a sample order with the project it belongs to. The checkout's fixed "Order Comments" field is relabeled "Project Name" in the storefront, and the value travels to the ERP with the order.
“Working with ECP has been very helpful as they are very knowledgeable about BigCommerce. They were very patient with me, and are available to answer any questions. I highly recommend ECP.
Project Gallery
Specs, Colors & PDF Downloads
Product Page
Second ERP Database
Finished Goods
One Codebase, One Pipeline
Two Brands
BigCommerce and ERP work like this.
Richloom is a BigCommerce Enterprise build where the ERP stays the source of truth and the client runs its own publishing. If your catalog lives in a back-office system and you want the website to follow it rather than duplicate it, these pages cover how we approach it.
Does your catalog live in an ERP?
We build storefronts that follow your back office instead of duplicating it, on BigCommerce or Shopify Plus.
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