Parry Athletics.

Evan had been a Parry customer for years. The gear was exceptional; best quality, best fit, and the most distinctive style in the market, on or off the mats. But in 2021 and again in 2025, orders were taking 60-plus days to fulfill with no explanation. Not pre-orders. Just a long wait with no visibility into why.

We reached out — not as a vendor looking for work, but as customers who could see exactly what was happening and had a clear idea of how to fix it. The message was direct: you have the best product in the game and your fulfillment experience is eroding all the goodwill you’ve created. Let’s talk. George took the meeting. That was the start of the engagement.

George had done what every great founder does: he put everything into the product and the brand. Parry’s creative direction, its aesthetic, its standing in the BJJ community — all of that came from George’s taste and instinct. The hardest part was done, but the potential he’d created couldn’t be realized without the right support.

What he hadn’t had time to build was the operational layer underneath it. Parry was running three parallel fulfillment streams — print-on-demand, one factory for one set of products, and a second factory for another — each with its own timeline and process, with no governing standards across any of them. It is common for a founder-led brand to grow faster than its systems. The business had reached the point where it needed more infrastructure than one person could hold in their head.

Production orders went to the factory by email, carrying whatever information happened to be in the message. Customer communications came in through email, Instagram, and Facebook. The tools were there — Shopify, Gorgias, various fulfillment integrations — but they’d been set up for speed, not for the level of operational complexity Parry had grown into.

The mapping session made it clear: the brand had outgrown its infrastructure, and George was the one absorbing all the friction that created.

We started where the customer experience broke down. Diagnosed why international orders were showing no shipping rate at checkout, traced it through the Shopify plan configuration and fulfillment setup, and got real DHL rates live. Then built the communication layer around it — proper timeline setting and expectation management so customers knew what to expect before they started wondering.

We audited every channel Parry used for customer communication and pulled everything into one place: email, Instagram, and Facebook in a single Gorgias view. Built reusable rules and macros for the recurring cases, and pre-order messaging that catches shipping questions early. A backlog of roughly 1500 tickets went from scattered across three platforms to managed in one.

Manufacturing needed a real system. We built a structured intake process in ClickUp — every order got a Parry order number, a customer record, delivery details, and design files, all in one place. For the first time, an order existed as a record that could be tracked and handed off without relying on anyone’s memory. It went into production immediately. Within two weeks, order volume and SKU complexity had outgrown it. That was a good problem — it meant the brand was moving.

The thing that mattered most — holding a single order across many designs, colorways, and sizes as one coherent record — wasn’t something any off-the-shelf tool handled well enough, so we built it. The Parry OMS is a custom web application built specifically for how Parry operates. The intake form adapts to the product type — fields for variants and sizing appear only where they’re relevant. Address autocomplete validates shipping destinations as you type. A shared design library carries every past design so nothing gets re-entered from scratch. When an order is ready, one click generates a formatted purchase order and sends it directly to the manufacturer, while automatically updating the production board in ClickUp. Orders can be staged across multiple sessions, edited until they’re right, and locked when they go to production. The full history is searchable. The system is built to be operated by anyone on the team. It’s been in daily production use for six months with no issues or outstanding feature requests.

With operations stable, we mapped the revenue side. We built a ClickUp-based CRM covering custom orders, partner restocks, and brand partnerships — deal stages, a view that surfaces opportunities going cold, and a full history of every account and contact the brand has worked with.

Design is the input everything else depends on. Every Parry product requires a tech pack — design files, construction details, fit specifications — and the creative process had no formal infrastructure around it. As Parry grew, that created a capacity ceiling. We built a design and labor management system that handles the full lifecycle from idea to approved production proof, with timelines, files, comments, approval gates, and oversight at every stage. It connects directly to the sales CRM and the OMS, so a customer moves through the entire Parry stack without anything falling out of the system. It’s built to scale from one designer to however many the brand needs.

lastslice now holds the operational and technical leadership role at Parry. George runs creative direction and product — the work that only he can do, the work that gave the brand its identity in the first place.

The scope has grown because each piece of work earned the next one. Every system we built made the next opportunity visible, and the results spoke clearly enough that the relationship has moved toward an equity partnership. That conversation is underway.