Lightyear Case Study: Alo Yoga

Learn about how Alo Yoga utilized Lightyear's Telecom Operating system to automate telecom procurement, inventory management, and bill payment with software.

Meet the Client

Alo Yoga is a high-growth global apparel retailer that operates nearly 100 retail locations, warehouses, and other facilities across the US, Canada, and UK. Alo has undergone significant expansion in recent years, recently topping $1bn in revenue, and scaling from 10 retail locations at the start of 2023 to 100+ by the end of 2024. All of that scaling at such a rapid pace can strain even the most well-run IT team, so we spoke to Nick Jaquay, Director of IT Operations at Bella & Canvas (Alo Yoga’s parent), about Alo Yoga’s recent growth journey and Lightyear’s role in it.

Growth Necessitates Process Change

Prior to engaging Lightyear, Alo Yoga was a smaller operation with just a few facility openings per year, which meant that non-scalable IT operations didn’t cause issues.

Beginning in 2022, Alo’s expansion became much more ambitious than in previous years and it became clear that the IT team would need a system to “keep things sane” and properly manage expansion. As more circuit orders began flowing with impending store opening deadlines, order and circuit details began to get lost in the shuffle from time to time, creating issues. Further, the barrage of ongoing implementations that Alo’s IT team was managing grew into a major time sink, creating risk of missed deadlines.

More ISPs and circuits of course also means more bills, and an unpaid ISP bill could yield a costly outage. Alo’s AP team had to deal with many more ISP bills from more vendors, leading to the occasional outage when a bill was missed.

On top of all of this, Nick wasn’t in a position to grow headcount on his IT team at the time, which led him searching for a potential solution to some of these expansion woes.

Lightyear as a One-Stop ISP Solution

Nick initially discovered Lightyear’s Network Inventory Manager via Reddit and was intrigued with the product given some of the issues noted above. He initially opted to trial Lightyear’s free Procurement software to see how things would work if he purchased a few circuits for new stores with Lightyear, to which he was pleasantly surprised with the experience and outcomes.

It was after some early good experiences that Nick opted to purchase Lightyear’s Network Inventory Manager and Bill Consolidation services to fully shift telecom procurement and management toward Lightyear’s software-centric approach. Now, with all of Alo’s circuit details onboarded to Lightyear, their IT team would not have to rely on spreadsheets to track and manage ongoing circuit orders and inventory, and service issues, tickets, and renewals could be handled with ease with one centralized system in hand. At all times, each circuit’s status, details, SLAs, IPs, and other important information are all in one place for team collaboration.

Further, Alo’s AP team could rest easy knowing that bills would be paid on time and outages for nonpayment would be avoided, with disputes created and tracked if Alo was misbilled for a circuit.

Most importantly, Alo has been able to leverage Lightyear to achieve 2023’s aggressive store opening ambitions with success and systems in place for long-term scalability.

A Mutually Beneficial Partnership

Lightyear prides itself on constantly taking in customer feedback to drive rapid iterations against customer pain points, and Nick / Alo Yoga have been a valuable source of product feedback that has served to drive valuable improvements in the past 18 months, particularly in the areas of implementation management and bill payment.

Given the value Alo has seen from Lightyear, Nick noted that Alo has pushed in cost areas outside of telecom to aggregate vendor and spend information via systems to see if similar cost and time optimizations are feasible.