With popular historic plants and seeds, personalised damask pillows and a curated selection of books about slavery, we’re diving into a place where all purchases support a fascinating and complex UNESCO World Heritage Site; Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s mountaintop home and plantation.
We first spoke to the team in January 2024, to understand their goals and visions for Brightpearl, Shopify and their charity-specific accounting. We would be working with these goals over the next few months to optimise sales and accounting for the Foundation.
Charitable contributions
As author of the Declaration of Independence, the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom and the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson’s place in history is secure. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation® seeks to bring this history forward into national and global dialogues – particularly around liberty and self-government. And all sales at The Shop directly support this mission. For those who want to give a little more, pre-set donation values have been made available exclusively via the Shopify site. We designed and built a custom Finance Export App to automatically track and export all donation activity, ensuring smooth and accurate financial reconciliation.
Tavern takings
Thomas Jefferson visited many inns and taverns on his trips through western Massachusetts in 1784 and 1791. And Monticello guests aren’t left thirsty either. With food and beverages available to visitors on site, we linked each sales channel and POS via advanced and deep integration between Shopify and Brightpearl to effortlessly synchronise orders, payments and stock. The Foundation is live with two POS locations: The Farm Shop and the Visitor Center Shop — both of which now feed directly into central inventory and accounting, offering real-time visibility and control.
Streamlined operations
To accommodate a complex set of fulfilment paths, we supported multiple order types across both retail and wholesale environments, including web orders, web orders with gift notes, web order returns, wholesale, department orders and POS order refund and exchange.
Each order type now flows cleanly from Shopify into Brightpearl, allowing the team to track sales, manage stock, and handle returns with confidence. Web order returns, previously a manual process, are now seamlessly managed with full traceability and audit support.
Personalised products, professional workflows
Sales orders of personalised items, from engraved pewter spoons to ale mugs, once required manual weekly collation. Today, Shopify orders trigger an automated flow that sends all necessary information to the engraver the moment a sale is made.
The integration also manages real-time inventory visibility, ensuring the team knows exactly what’s in stock, what’s committed, and what’s awaiting fulfilment — reducing delays, errors, and admin headaches.
