Group Bayport, a conglomerate of eight e-commerce brands specializing in custom products, is the latest e-commerce player to acquire an outdoor furniture manufacturer. With news that it acquired NorthCape, the company is building its outdoor portfolio in a way that makes sense for both companies.
Nishant Shah, founder of Group Bayport, started the business as a signage and outdoor display provider that began by making customized signs for small businesses. The company continued to add categories and eventually added outdoor cushions and seat covers, which helped propel Group Bayport into the outdoor category.
“We found that people who were looking for covers had issues with them being too large or small, or they needed something to accommodate products like outdoor kitchens, and there was no place to easily get custom covers,” Shah says.
That brand turned into Coversandall.com, and this was the key to the NorthCape acquisition.
Both companies benefit from the merger — Group Bayport gets the trusted NorthCape name, while NorthCape has access to resources to help their customers in new ways.
“We are a vertically integrated operation, and when a few companies that had approached us to do like covers products we saw a great opportunity,” Shah says. “We were looking at the overlap between our covers business and NorthCape’s, and we saw how we can add value to it. They have a big replacement cushion business, which is also a big business for us. When we talked to them, the synergies were amazing. They were looking to expand their replacement cushion program — while already producing about 20,000 or more square yards every day on cushions in Chicago. With us coming in, we could add more to that cushion capacity and launch our covers program to thousands of active NorthCape customers.”
However, Shah says, NorthCape will continue to operate as it has been, and Group Bayport will not step in and change their processes. Tom Murray will continue as CEO with Group Bayport as a useful support system to increase production and sales.
“We are able to bring much more optimization to their manufacturing and their supply chain, which we have already been doing,” he says. “And then we’re finding a lot more opportunity when we bring in our scale of production. It’s only been eight weeks but we already seeing growth. The NorthCape customers I’ve met with are excited about the potential, and we are on track to grow about 30%-40% next year.”
Shah says he sees that there’s more and more of a need for customers also to have bespoke solutions, and he plans to keep expanding in the outdoor category.
“We’re not a financial institute who requires companies to meet sales for public trading,” Shah says. “We want to acquire companies where we can bring our expertise and help them grow.”
