Born in 2022, Sowvital is a British lifestyle brand offering fragrance, hand care, and elevated garden accessories for the design-conscious customer. When Jack Lewis, founder of Sowvital, began creating high-end products for houseplants, he had a vision to elevate plant care into a lifestyle – and made a bold move when establishing the business.
Lewis decided that Sowvital would adopt Oracle NetSuite’s cloud ERP system to help manage its financial operations and inventory before making its first sale. Fast forward to today, and that decision has paid dividends. Now selling 84 products across 14 countries, Sowvital has grown into a premium luxury plant care brand catering to both indoor and outdoor gardeners and has created lasting partnerships with renowned retailers along the way.
Taking a leaf from the growth playbook
“It’s a bit like having one kitchen rather than five kitchenettes. It’s incredibly valuable and makes our operations more straightforward,” said Lewis, on the decision to implement NetSuite.
Having NetSuite in place from the beginning gave Sowvital a strong foundation for growth by centralising all operational data in a single cloud-based system. This made it easier to identify areas of opportunity and streamline processes, all under one roof. “NetSuite has given us transparency and organisational structure,” Lewis said. “So, when you’re reviewing your SKUs (stock keeping units) and components to see where you can make efficiencies in your supply chain, you’ve got all the information in one place, and you’ve got it organised in a way that you can unpack.”
“Our financial and operational data is all in NetSuite, as opposed to it being spread out across someone’s desktop and a load of spreadsheets. We can make better decisions because our data is in one place.”
Lewis highlighted NetSuite’s role in helping the company scale quickly, adapt strategically and maintain operational control through every stage of expansion. “It gave us a competitive edge from day one,” he said. “Now that we’re growing rapidly, that decision feels even more critical. By having NetSuite from the start, the entire lifecycle of our business is there and can help inform where we go next.”
Growing into something bigger
Sowvital’s growth has been consistent since those early days. The brand has evolved from houseplant care into a broader gardening and lifestyle offering everything from garden tools, accessories, and fertilisers, to gifting items like hand creams.
“We’ve grown into something much broader,” Lewis tells Elite Business. “It’s about enhancing the joy of gardening – whether that’s feeding your plants, growing from seed, pruning, grooming, or even just giving a beautifully packaged hand cream to someone who loves plants. Our retail partners are constantly asking us to innovate and expand. That’s a huge compliment, but it also adds operational pressure. NetSuite gives us the control and visibility to deliver on those expectations without compromising on quality.”
One of Sowvital’s biggest milestones has been its expansion from the home to the garden. With a new premium fertiliser product range coming soon, Lewis praised NetSuite for making its overseas expansion steady and seamless as the system provides real-time, transparent analysis of data. “I think there are natural challenges to expansion and operating in multiple countries, but the beauty of NetSuite means that we’ve got great accuracy in terms of where products are sourced through to where they’ve been sold into, and then doing a cost and benefit analysis of our sales and keeping a tight grip on our financials and cash flow.”
And when it comes to forecasting seasonal demand for products, NetSuite helps predict inventory requirements before they arise. “You need a few years of data before you can really see seasonal trends like Christmas surges and summer peaks. NetSuite stores all that data in one place, and over time, we’ve been able to build demand planning models. Now we can confidently predict what to expect and prepare inventory accordingly.”
With so many lines of product, efficient inventory management is essential. Sowvital uses NetSuite to track components, forecast production, and optimise stock levels across different markets. “It’s not just about knowing what you have – it’s about understanding where and when you’ll need it,” Lewis says. “NetSuite helps us place the right stock in the right location at the right time.”
AI in bloom
Sowvital has also benefited from AI features as NetSuite introduces new capabilities. For instance, NetSuite Text Enhance, NetSuite’s genAI capability, has helped support the creation of consistent, on-brand content at scale. “Text Enhance is brilliant. It understands our tone of voice and pulls from our actual product data, which makes the outputs spot-on. It’s tightened up our product content significantly.”
But the company’s ambitions for AI go far beyond text. Thanks to NetSuite’s centralised data, Sowvital is experimenting with new ways to manage variables across its global operations.
“Because we keep everything in one place, we know that AI runs itself off of a data set,” said Lewis. “Its ability to analyse and create outputs is only as good as the source material it has. If you are putting everything in one place like you do in NetSuite, you’ve got all your source material there. So we’re excited to leverage AI to start predicting things cash flow crunches on certain products or SKUs that have, for example, very long lead time in terms of retail payments, and it will be able to intelligently forecast those.”
As Sowvital moves into its next growth phase, its strategy remains closely tied to its data. “In an increasingly complex global landscape, that level of agility is a major advantage,” Lewis said. “Data-driven decisions are becoming increasingly important for us as a business that has now been trading for several years and has a good repository of data. We’re able to model our operations in a robust system like NetSuite and look at the implications that things like cross-border trade will have on our operations and profitability and manage it and tweak our plans accordingly.”
