Vertical
Apparel & Fashion
Software Integrated
ChannelAdvisor & Shipster
Region
UK
Company Size
Start up
Mother and son duo Melissa and Jackson Burton are building a business with operational efficiency at its core
With a plan to sell a broad range of women’s underwear on their own website and across various international ecommerce marketplaces, UK-based BraForMe was born in the lockdown era.
This business model presents 3 challenges:
- Listing on as many channels as possible to attain maximum market-reach
- Buying the right quantities of each product and size
- Ensuring inventory is razor-sharp across those channels and fulfilllment can keep up
Getting started
In the early stages, BraForMe managed the front-end listing side of their business with trusted partner ChannelAdvisor. The back-office? A heap of boxes in their front room. Classic start-up stuff that we love to see and works a treat to get things off the ground. Their version of ‘inventory management’ was taking a pen to a box, removing the item purchased by the customer, and scribbling on the piece of paper attached to the box the new ‘count’ of that item.
At just 100 orders a day, this was creating 8 hours of manual work for Jackson; printing off labels one by one, cutting them to size, finding the right items, and so on, with no way of automatically keeping inventory levels in sync across the various sales channels.
In fact, it was before their official Go-Live that BraForMe first experienced the ‘Peoplevox effect’! Upon creating all their locations, scanning the products into the system and doing their first digital stock take, the team discovered they had 10-20% more stock than they were expecting. Talk about quick wins – they could list this stock immediately for sale.
Once up and running, the immediate productivity gains of scan-driven picking and packing were felt across the operation. Before it took the team all day to process 100 orders, but within the first week using Peoplevox that effort became more than manageable for just one operator.
Vital stats
- 4 full-time warehouse employees
- 60 picks per hour minimum – capability for this to flex to 180 when required
- 200-600 items per pick run in multi-item batch picks
- Receipt of goods –> available online = 5-10 mins
- Next day delivery cut-off = 20 minutes before courier arrives
Pictures from the first packing station (left) and Jackson surveying their second space, unfortunately aware that 20% of stock was unnaccounted for (above)!
Continued growth and scale
Over the first 12-month period, the business saw a growth of between 20 – 70% month over month, and order volumes steadily increased. Wishing to maintain a lean operation, BraForMe used the data from Peoplevox to understand exactly how many users it needed to hit the fulfilllment targets each month, adding new pack benches and users when appropriate.
Fast-forward to the present day. BraForMe has between 3 and 4 thousand locations in a 1,700sq ft warehouse, with racking installed, bulk locations, and a large pick face. It’s divided into different types of products (hanging, boxed, padded, etc.) to ensure things aren’t crushed. The team is lean, with only four full-time operatives picking and packing orders, but that doesn’t mean it’s not mighty. The company still turns over half a million pounds monthly out of this operation!
“As a small business that needs a tight handle on cashflow,
one of the best things about Peoplevox is the way it allows us to scale as needed, one user at a time. We compare the information from the system and our revenue numbers to identify when the right time is to add more resource, be that a new printer, scanner or full-time member of staff.”
Jackson Burton
Director
BraForMe
“We managed to impress Amazon with how fast we deliver orders.
By getting things shipped ahead of the expected time, we find our products are getting featured more often in the Buy Box, which helps sales massively. Amazon actually reached out to us unprompted and invited us to move onto their Automated Shipping service, meaning the timelines for delivery listed against our products are much shorter, again, increasing conversion!”
Jackson Burton
Director
BraForMe
Unbeatable service levels on marketplaces
As a reseller, with the majority of their sales coming on marketplaces such as Amazon, it’s not just the end customers BraForMe needs to keep happy. The marketplaces themselves have strict guidelines for time-to-fulfill, shipment tracking and other performance metrics. This means that if the warehouse isn’t performing, marketplaces will actually ban you from selling on them, and close your account, leading to an instant loss of sales potential and market reach.
However, thanks to the speed and accuracy of their Peoplevox-powered fulfilllment operation, BraForMe actually surpasses even the most exacting requirements from marketplaces.
Learning as they grow
With a background in finance, Jackson Burton is always looking for ways to optimise the business with data and analytics. The reporting capabilities of Peoplevox help him do this in two major ways. Making decisions based on facts – not feelings – is a sure-fire way to scale up without risk and maintain that lean operating model the owners have championed throughout the past two years.
Here’s some more info about the Peoplevox integration with ChannelAdvisor, and if you want to speak with a fulfilllment expert today, just fill out this form and tell us about your operation!
“With Peoplevox, I can pull reports on stock that isn’t shifting, and use that intel to communicate with our listers to get it sold at discount. More than that, though, I can create data-informed size curves based on the inventory data and sales data out of PVX. I’m able to understand which styles are popular in which sizes, sometimes even by region, and only order from our suppliers exactly what we know we can sell. This feeds into our long-term purchasing strategy across the various brands. There’s no way we could do anything like this with our previous manual ways of working.“