Industry: Wholesale & Retail Home Décor | Location: United Kingdom
6
team members
5,000+
SKUs Managed
20+
Years in Business
About Jarapa
Jarapa is a UK-based wholesale and retail business with over 20 years of trading history. Specialising in ethically sourced, natural and recycled homewares, the company supplies an extensive range of products including recycled glassware, handcrafted lamps, lampshades, ceramics, and rugs — all sourced primarily from artisan producers in Spain, Morocco, and Portugal.
With a team of six and a customer base spanning independent boutiques, garden centres, furniture stores, and prestigious accounts such as Liberty London, Jarapa has built its reputation on quality, sustainability, and strong relationships with independent retailers across the UK.
The product range is highly complex: a single lamp vase available in six colours, combined with 15 flex colour options, can generate up to 90 SKUs — and with lampshades, ceramics, rugs, and tableware added in, Jarapa manages over 5,000 SKUs in total, many of which are made to order.
The Challenge
A growing business outgrowing its spreadsheets
As Jarapa grew, its reliance on manual processes became an increasingly significant drag. Stock planning, performance analysis, and buying decisions all depended on a spreadsheet system that required hours of work each cycle: downloading sales data from QuickBooks, manually manipulating it, and feeding figures into custom formulas to estimate pallet quantities for container shipments from Spain.
The process was held together by the skill and dedication of one team member — but it was never designed to scale. It produced a snapshot, not a living view of the business, and left no room for the kind of granular analysis that confident buying decisions require.
"It was a lot of manual work. You can only pull out so many reports from QuickBooks — we just couldn't drill down into colour, size, or any real detail."
QuickBooks could show total sales of a product line, but couldn't reveal whether blue 24cm vases were outperforming amber ones, or which lamp flex colours were driving the most orders. For a business where colour and size combinations determine almost every buying decision, that blind spot was costly — in time spent working around it, and in the confidence it eroded.
Managing wholesale stock amplified the problem further. Jarapa's customers order in irregular volumes and at unpredictable intervals — one account might take six units at a time, another might place a single order for sixty. Demand could spike or go quiet for months. Without reliable data, even two decades of trading experience could only go so far.
"I've been doing this for 20 years and there was a lot of guessing. Obviously quite good guessing — but still guessing."
The Solution
Discovering Kaleidoscope
Stewart, Jarapa's founder, discovered Kaleidoscope at a trade and technology show at the NEC in Birmingham — a first-time visit prompted by a desire to find greater efficiencies across the business. After a conversation with the Kaleidoscope team on the stand, he saw potential in the platform's approach to product-level sales analysis.
Joining the Early Access Programme suited Jarapa well. Because the business wasn't under immediate pressure to change systems, Stewart could evaluate Kaleidoscope at a measured pace — working collaboratively with the team rather than being thrown into a time-pressured onboarding.
"Because it was in its infancy, it almost made it easier. Rather than a 7-to-14-day trial and hitting the ground running, working with David and Hanna both ways has made it a lot easier to implement."
Dedicated support from day one
As an Early Access customer, Jarapa benefits from Kaleidoscope's hands-on support model — something Stewart credits as a key factor in the successful rollout. Every Early Access customer is assigned a dedicated relationship manager who is also a product expert, providing ongoing guidance to help them get maximum value from the platform.
Implementation and onboarding are included at no extra cost: the Kaleidoscope team worked directly with Jarapa to upload products and sales data, configure the system to their workflows, and train the team through live sessions — removing the typical friction of getting a new platform up and running.
This model stands in contrast to the standard SaaS experience of a short free trial followed by self-serve onboarding. For a small team already stretched across warehouse operations, lamp-making, and sales, having expert support available throughout made the difference between Kaleidoscope remaining a background project and becoming a genuinely embedded tool.
"The customer service is exceptional and there's always someone on hand."
Implementing the platform
Jarapa has integrated Kaleidoscope alongside QuickBooks and their existing inventory system, using it primarily to analyse sales at the SKU level — by colour, size, and product type — in a way that was previously impossible. A new team member has been brought on specifically to help maximise use of the platform.
The plan is to upload sales data weekly going forward, keeping the platform current and enabling real-time stock decisions whenever a new order needs to be placed.
The Results
Granular visibility across 5,000+ SKUs
The most immediate and significant benefit for Jarapa has been the ability to drill into product performance at a level of detail that was simply out of reach before.
This granularity is particularly valuable when evaluating new product lines. Rather than relying on instinct about which colours or sizes to invest in, Stewart can now cross-reference historical sales data by attribute before committing to a new order — a capability that directly supports Jarapa's twice-yearly new product intake cycles.
"With Kaleidoscope, we can just look at blues, pinks, ambers across the whole range fairly quickly and see which ones are selling best — the larger sizes, the smaller sizes. That's going to be very useful."
Make Your Own Table: views built for your business
One of the features Stewart has found particularly valuable is Kaleidoscope's Make Your Own Table — a fully customisable data view that lets users choose exactly which columns and rows appear, and arrange them to suit how they think about their products.
For a business like Jarapa — where the same product might need to be analysed by colour, size, channel, and stock level simultaneously — this level of flexibility means the platform moulds to the way the team already thinks, rather than forcing them to adapt to a rigid layout.
"The system has so much data on it that you can use, and all the different ways it can be formatted when you're looking at products. You go in, click at the top, and you can edit — put different lines and different columns in. Once you get used to it and know which columns or lines you want, you can take one out and put another in. I think that was really, really good."
From reactive workflows to structured planning
The shift Jarapa is making with Kaleidoscope is more than a tool swap — it's a move from reactive, manual workflows to a structured, data-driven planning approach. Where the old process required significant effort just to produce a usable picture of the business, Kaleidoscope keeps that picture current and queryable at any time.
Jarapa is now transitioning to using Kaleidoscope as a core planning tool, with weekly data uploads replacing the ad-hoc spreadsheet exports that previously drove ordering decisions. The last major container order was planned using Kaleidoscope as the primary reference — with the legacy spreadsheet kept only as a final cross-check. That cross-check role is shrinking too.
The hours previously spent downloading, manipulating, and reformatting data are being reclaimed. As full weekly adoption takes hold, the team estimates they'll save several hours per ordering cycle — time that can go back into running and growing the business rather than maintaining spreadsheets.
"We're moving towards using it fully and keeping everything updated weekly."
"The only thing left is calculating pallet quantities."
"We could probably save ourselves a few hours a week, by the time we get to fully implementing it across the business."
Greater confidence in decision-making
Perhaps more importantly, Kaleidoscope gives Stewart a way to validate — and sometimes challenge — his own assumptions. When he believes a particular colour or style is performing well, he can now verify it against the data rather than acting on instinct alone.
"I mainly want to use it to make sure that what I'm thinking is going on is actually going on. You can have something in your mind like, 'that's a good selling product,' but it's not always correct."
Summary
Challenge
Manual, time-intensive spreadsheet process that couldn't scale — no SKU-level colour or size visibility, and hours spent per ordering cycle just to produce usable data
Goal
Replace guesswork with data validation; improve stock availability and new product planning
Result
Granular, attribute-level sales analysis across 5,000+ SKUs — enabling faster, more confident buying decisions
Outcome
Transitioning to weekly data-driven planning; spreadsheet almost entirely replaced; several hours saved per order cycle; confident, attribute-level buying decisions
In their own words
How would you describe Kaleidoscope in a sentence?
"A user-friendly forecasting tool — and I think it would be great for small and large businesses."
What you would say to someone considering using Kaleidoscope?
"If they think it's something they could use, they should definitely go for a trial. The customer service is exceptional and there's always someone on hand. If you want to know anything about your products or sales, I think it would help a lot of businesses."
What is the most valuable thing about using it?
"Just feeling organised myself, rather than guessing. It's a useful tool to affirm things you thought you knew about your own business."
Be part of building Kaleidoscope
We're working closely with a small group of early access customers and finance professionals in the run-up to our commercial launch. Whether you're ready to start planning today or want to help shape the platform — there's a place for you.