# How Kith is turning retail onboarding from a manual checklist into an HR-driven workflow

_Kith · 2026-08-05_

**Topics:** ITSM, Onboarding & Offboarding, HR, Access Management

Kith runs about 20 stores across New York, the West Coast, Europe and Hawaii, plus a Brooklyn headquarters, with an eight-person IT team supporting close to 1,000 employees. Retail turnover means onboarding happens almost daily, and a store opening brings 50 to 60 new hires at once. In 2026 Kith began replacing Freshservice with Harmony and wiring Workday, Google Workspace and its on-prem Active Directory into a single agent-driven flow.

## Results

- **57%** - of employee questions resolved by the agent with no ticket opened
- **50-70%** - of helpdesk effort went to onboarding and offboarding
- **4,400** - Freshservice tickets migrated
- **25 min** - to connect Google Workspace, Slack, MDM, Apple Business Manager and Freshservice

## At a glance

- **Industry:** Apparel and lifestyle retail
- **Headquarters:** Brooklyn, New York
- **Workforce:** Close to 1,000 employees, about 750 in stores and 250 at HQ
- **Footprint:** About 20 stores across the US, Europe and Hawaii
- **IT team:** Eight people including helpdesk and business analytics, led by Adi Shniderman, Head of IT
- **Where employees ask:** Slack, including store emergency channels, and the self-service portal
- **Connected context:** Google Workspace, Workday, on-prem Active Directory, Slack, Kandji, ManageEngine, Apple Business Manager, Dropbox, Freshservice for the migration
- **Replaced:** Freshservice, and a service catalog that was fulfilled almost entirely by hand

## The challenge: a catalog of hundreds of items, almost none of them automated

Kith had run Freshservice for years, and Adi Shniderman had never seriously looked at an alternative. The platform worked the traditional way: go to a portal, pick a category, fill in a form. "In our environment, which is very fast, it takes time," Adi says. Stores had Slack emergency channels for outages and little else, so requests arrived as a tap on the shoulder, a phone call or a Slack message, and the helpdesk turned them into tickets by hand.

The service catalog listed hundreds of items, from Tableau and Dropbox licenses to alarm codes and access cards, but almost none of them were automated. "The majority is manual, like 95 percent," Adi says. Onboarding and offboarding were the heaviest load, accounting for 50 to 70% of what the helpdesk did: HR copied new-hire data from Workday into Freshservice, hiring managers ticked boxes in onboarding kits, and a person executed every step.

Identity was scattered across four places - Google Workspace for email and SSO, Active Directory for computer authentication, Workday as the HR record, and VRP, Kith's in-house point-of-sale and inventory platform, with its own user list. New hires who never showed up still got access, and periodically the team had to audit "tens if not hundreds" of orphaned POS accounts.

Harmony's analysis of Kith's last 5,000 Freshservice tickets put numbers on it: onboarding, offboarding and application access made up 40% of volume, and half of all tickets once password resets were included.

## Why Harmony: the interface, and the onboarding math

The Slack-native agent was the hook. "What I really like is the interface and the fact that it really works through Slack," Adi said on the first call. A week later: "The interaction is great with the bot versus going to a portal and opening a ticket. That's what drives me to this place, especially in the way we work here, which is pretty fast."

The business case was onboarding.

> We have 20 stores all around the world and a very small IT team that takes care of them. With Harmony the ROI is obvious: autonomous resolution of tickets, especially when it comes to onboarding and offboarding, is exactly what a retail operation like ours needs.
>
> - Adi Shniderman, Head of IT, Kith

Kith also wanted consolidation: ticketing, asset management across ManageEngine, Kandji and Apple Business Manager, SaaS management and workflow automation in one place, rather than another tool for each. Walking through the old onboarding kits with Harmony, Adi summed up the gap: "Essentially, we do what you just said, but manually."

## Deployment: no cloud directory, and no plans for one

The proof of value kicked off in December 2025. Google SSO, Slack, ManageEngine, Apple Business Manager and Freshservice were connected in about 25 minutes on the kickoff call. A week later a Google Workspace password reset agent was demonstrated live in Slack and switched on the same day. Kandji followed in January.

The production rollout in mid-2026 had to work around constraints most SaaS-first companies never see. Kith has no cloud directory and no plans for one. "We're not going to move into Okta. We're not going to move into any kind of cloud directory anytime soon," Adi said. So Harmony connected the on-prem Active Directory over LDAPS through a Cloudflare tunnel, bridged Google groups into role-based access, and connected Workday so employee data such as departments flows in without anyone copying it.

Harmony migrated about 4,400 Freshservice tickets and every catalog item Kith wanted to keep, and began moving the knowledge base. The agent went into store emergency channels, and the portal was opened to the Retail, Design and HR groups in August 2026. HR now runs its own desk.

## The results so far

Kith is a few weeks into its user rollout, and the early pattern is clear. Of the conversations employees have had with the Harmony agent, 57% were resolved without a ticket being opened. Since the broader August rollout that figure has been 51%, while weekly volume grew from single digits to 44 to 68 conversations a week. The most common topics are application access, password resets, group membership and hardware questions - the categories Harmony's ticket analysis had flagged as automatable.

### The onboarding thesis, now being built

The first custom agent, Dropbox provisioning driven by Google group membership, is live. The second, which reads a new hire's department from Workday and assigns the right Google groups automatically, was tested live in September against a mapping of 346 groups.

> Google and Workday don't talk to each other today. They'll talk through Harmony - and the workflow to auto-provision Dropbox from Google groups already worked amazing.
>
> - Adi Shniderman, Head of IT, Kith

### Smaller wins came fast

When Adi wanted Apple hardware to be requestable only by certain departments, the rule went into the catalog item's description. "It worked. The agent answered that the item was not available to a requester." When the asset team asked for auto-generated asset tags, the feature shipped in three days.

## What's next

Kith is finishing the move of onboarding and offboarding onto Workday-driven agents, with a target of 95% or better automation, and extending Harmony to Building and Maintenance alongside IT and HR. Store equipment tagged with QR codes that open a ticket on scan is on the list.

> All the things I asked for that were missing, this is exactly it. For the stores, it's paradise.
>
> - Adi Shniderman, Head of IT, Kith