Pentland Brands: Entering into the B2C market
The Challenge
Pentland is one of the leading brand management companies trading in the sports, outdoor and fashion markets. Originally only selling through resellers, to expand their business and gain better control they decided to break into the direct to consumer market, as Guy Edmondson, DC Manager, explains, “on-line selling gives any brand potentially far greater market penetration than it otherwise might have had, and complete control over how the brand and the range is presented to the end-consumer.”
However, this opened up a whole new set of logistics challenges as Pentland realised that they could not simply duplicate their B2B business systems in the B2C environment.
The Solution
This is where MetaPack came in to assist with their fulfilment. The reason they chose MetaPack Delivery Manager was because their direct customers did not have links to carriers and DM could link directly to Pentland’s website platform. With the economies of scale of increased number of smaller deliveries (rather than the fewer larger ones they were used to in B2B), the reduced pack time afforded by DM owing to being able to default to the most cost effective shipping and accurate carrier label-production became essential.
Of the thirteen brands in the portfolio, not all are trading online as yet but among those that are using DM are Speedo (their first site to be launched with DM on their back end), Boxfresh, Clerk & Teller, Kickers and One True Saxon and more are set to move in that direction. With a simple integration which included their ecommerce provider “Cybercom” and support in designing the packing area, their Speedo website was the first to be launched using DM. Pentland have since not found any problems using the system across the various brands owing to its common look and feel and have initially set up a “warehouse within a warehouse” to fulfill their e-commerce orders. This “has allowed us to be very cost-effective at an early stage, and most importantly we have been able to guarantee stock availability and achieve very high customer satisfaction through on-time despatch and delivery aided by MetaPack’s DM” says Mr Edmondson.
Through their experience of throughput activity, they have built in masses of spare capacity in the fulfilment operation ready for any surges and future planned developments. They are already looking at using DM for their EU and rest of world consignments as well as adding express carrier integration.
MetaPack’s connections with the IMRG and the Internet Shopping is Safe accreditation proved to be an added bonus, as Jeremy Wilson, Head of E-commerce Services explains, “customers are becoming increasingly concerned about on-line fraud. We believe that the ISIS and IDIS accreditations give customers reassurance that our sites are secure and well managed”. Simply by using MetaPack DM online retailers adhere to the 9 point charter and in order to further excellence in ecommerce, MetaPack pays for an ISIS accreditation for its customers which Pentland are currently applying for.
"We decided to go with DM rather than duplicate our B2B system because the majority of our direct customers are not WMS-led, and even those that are, do not have direct links to any carriers’ systems. MetaPack was able to be directly linked to our website platform, and has a number of advantages, most notably, it removes and automates the packers’ decision about which carrier and service to use, so leading to reduced error and costs, and secondly automates the production of the carriers’ label. When you are dealing with hundreds of small orders per day, the ability to default to the most cost-effective shipping and accurate carrier-label production, and the ability to maximise daily throughput by reduced ‘pack time per order’ become very important.
We are very happy with the performance of the system so far, and the reliability of MetaPack as a web-based system has been excellent."
Guy Edmondson DC Manager
