For Ridestore, the customer is the brand. Superior quality is non-negotiable across its lifestyle and outdoor apparel brands – including Montec and Dope Snow – all of which combine bold design with top performance.
As a direct-to-consumer business, every product is a reflection of the company’s promise to its customers, making optimized quality control (QC) and transparency essential for its continued success.
To support efforts to optimize customer experience and overall business performance, Ridestore implemented Qarma as its central QC tool for inspections, reporting, and data analysis.
From scattered data to a structured QC process
Ridestore started its search for a QC tool. The company was scaling fast and needed a way to manage quality across a growing product range and supplier network.
Ridestore’s teams were already gathering large amounts of inspection data, but much of it was scattered across emails, PDFs, and spreadsheets. The result was information overload and sub-optimal insights.
“We had plenty of data, but without Qarma it wasn’t usable or comparable,” Nhina Dalin, Quality Assurance Lead at Ridestore, says.
Valuable details, such as year-on-year performance metrics, took a lot of effort and time to find, share, and act on.
Building consistency in QC
After evaluating several tools, Ridestore chose Qarma with one of the deciding factors being how well it supported structure and consistency in inspections, something the team had identified as a priority.
For technical outdoor apparel like Ridestore’s, each garment has a lot of specifications, which challenge traditional QC approaches.
With Qarma, Ridestore created structured checklists designed to make inspections clearer and more consistent. By capturing photos directly during inspections, every finding is supported by visual context, making it easier for both suppliers and internal teams to understand what needs attention and why.
One reason was that Ridestore was able to generate and share data and insights in real-time across different suppliers, products, and countries, making it possible to spot tendencies and take action earlier in the process.
Ridestore sought an intuitive tool, which made it easy to onboard anyone who needed access, whether inspectors, managers, or suppliers, without worrying about cost or complexity. This made adoption smoother and encouraged broader use across the supply chain.
Turning QC data into actionable insights
Ridestore uses a comprehensive risk assessment matrix to evaluate risk profiles for each product, supplier, or order. The matrix is used to allocate resources based on where they will have the biggest positive impact.
The system determines inspection levels and where to inspect for each production run.
The risk profiles incorporate defect galleries, production reports, team observations, and supplier feedback to track quality down to the individual production unit level.
Ridestore sees these assessments as collaborative relation-building tools, creating proactive supplier relationships where trusted partners independently report issues.
“A failed inspection is not a closed door but a signal of what needs to change and how to improve. With Qarma, we can easily share how much progress you can make with quite small efforts,” Nhina Dalin says.
Catching defects in production rather than the warehouse
Ridestore sets clear expectations from the very first sample. By running thorough inspections early in production, the team identifies potential issues before they become costly defects later in the supply chain.
Through close collaboration with suppliers, Ridestore has built a shared understanding of what quality looks like. Transparency is the foundation for this partnership not just in findings, but in how improvements are made.
In practice, this has reduced defects discovered late in the production process and turned inspections into a proactive, collaborative process rather than a policing function.
Clarity in inspections. Consistency in outcomes
Since getting on board with Qarma, Ridestore has improved its overview of quality processes.
Inspection reports are summarized in a way that makes it easy to review findings and communicate directly with inspectors, suppliers, and the rest of the organization, even down to a specific checkpoint. This has sharpened collaboration by ensuring conversations focus on what matters most.
Consistency has also improved. By aligning what’s being checked and standardizing how results are shared, Ridestore has created a clear and consistent QC process both for their own team and their suppliers.
Looking ahead, Ridestore sees a future of quality as increasingly data-driven and transparent. It aims to integrate more of Qarma's advanced data capabilities into how it operates and thinks about quality.
“The future of quality is more data, more transparency, and sharper focus,” Nhina Dalin says.
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