Brand Collective is one of Australia’s leading fashion and apparel omnichannel retailers. The organisation receives nearly 4,000 orders every day. Here Daniel Allison, Logistics Manager at the company reveals why its WMS has been at the heart of any process improvements.
A truly omnichannel retailer, Brand Collective runs around 18 different retail platforms across a number of Australia’s most prominent brands in fashion and apparel.
Brand Collective boasts a portfolio of iconic owned and licensed brands, including Superdry, Volley, Clarks, Hush Puppies and Julius Marlow.
The company’s distribution centre in Altona North, Victoria services the entire Australian and New Zealand market.
Across its brand portfolio, Brand Collective operates in the B2C space as well as B2B, servicing online orders for the likes of Myer and THE ICONIC as well as marketplaces such as Ebay, Catch and Amazon.
Taking up the largest share of Australia’s e-commerce pie, fashion and apparel saw above average growth in Australia in 2019, at 22.3 per cent year-on-year. In addition, fashion remained the most popular category for Australia’s online shoppers, accounting for 35 per cent of all purchases.
These statistics were recorded prior to the COVID-19 online shopping boom, which has seen e-commerce levels break all previous numbers on record.
Without revealing specific numbers, Caleb Brown, Chief Financial and Operating Officer at Brand Collective confirms the company’s e-commerce growth in 2019 was significantly higher than Australian market trends.
“We’ve definitely seen significant growth across our online retail during COVID-19, particularly when all the retail stores started to close down at the end of March,” Daniel Allison, Logistics Manager at Brand Collective says.
Many consumers had no choice but to switch to online shopping and for many, this was their first delve into the e-commerce world.
It is predicted that this increase in online shopping is here to stay, and omnichannel retailers such as Brand Collective are already reaping the benefits of investing in a sophisticated and advanced Warehouse Management System (WMS) to meet this increase in demand.
Local support for the ANZ market
At its national distribution centre in Altona North, Brand Collective delivers an impressive amount of e-commerce orders. Fulfilling between 2,000 to 4,000 orders per day, that cover 25,000 to 35,000 units, the DC services 2,000 wholesale customers, 120 retail stores and 15 e-commerce stores. The site is home to nearly 50,000 SKUs and approximately 1.8 million units.
“The capacity across our brands was really tested during COVID-19 peaks in demand, but one thing we knew for sure was that the Microlistics software was rock solid,” Daniel says.
Daniel says the challenge at the beginning was ensuring Brand Collective had the right amount of resources in the right place, Microlistics WMS ensures they fulfil orders in 24 hours and there has been no issue in the software meeting the increase in demand.
For Daniel, one of the most important measures of success for Brand Collective is due dates. “Everything we do is based on meeting due dates, in order for us to meet customer delivery windows the order has to leave the warehouse on time. Since introducing Microlistics, we have total visibility of that and as a result we have been smashing our targets in this space,” he says.
Brand Collective implemented Microlistics WMS around four years ago. Daniel played a central role in the procurement and implementation of the project and says the whole team was unanimous in the decision that Microlistics was the right provider for Brand Collective.
“When selecting a new WMS provider, we ran a really exhaustive process. We involved most of the team in the process and invited a number of different vendors in to present their solution. We then asked each of the team members to rate and score them accordingly,” Daniel recalls.
Daniel says the decision was clear, Microlistics was the right vendor largely due to their flexibility. A further winning factor was that the support team are based in Australia. He also says that they were competitive on price.
“As they have a local support team, they know and understand who we are and what we’re trying to do. They know how our operation works and can quickly identify any issues, instead of 50 different steps you have to go through with a vendor that doesn’t understand the market you operate in,” Daniel says.
Real-time reporting
According to Daniel, one of the major benefits that Brand Collective has been able to realise through the Microlistics WMS is the amount of data and reporting that the business has access to.
“A huge upside for us is that this new system has given us so many opportunities to extract more data and continues to give us advanced visibility compared to our old system,” Daniel says.
Historically, if Daniel wanted to gain access or insight, he would have to engage the IT department and wait days for the information. But now, since implementing Microlistics, he says he can get access to whatever data he needs at the click of a button.
“We have also used the system to generate some automatic reports, that way we can continually refresh them throughout the day and see where we’re at in real-time,” he says.
This is echoed by Caleb. “Our previous WMS was not user friendly in terms of self-service data extraction. Getting simple information out of it was difficult and time consuming. But now we use the data we get out of the Microlistics software to not only monitor the business in real time, but also to inform ideas around how we can improve efficiency and labour productivity more generally,” he says.
Brand Collective receives online orders constantly. Having access to reports in real-time enables Daniel to make intelligent decisions around resources so that the warehouse operators can keep up with demand.
Advanced capabilities
For Daniel, Microlistics is more than a vendor, they are a trusted partner. They have introduced Brand Collective to many technology partners that meet their needs going forward “We work very closely with the team at Microlistics. They have been very proactive in showing us new technology. Whether it be voice picking or automation, we are constantly looking at ways to innovate with them,” he says.
Brand Collective operates its numerous brands through zoning areas in the warehouse. “Within our warehouse we have 12 different areas for each individual brand. This allows us to become more efficient in putting away stock and reducing pick paths,” Daniel says.
Through this process, Brand Collective uses Microlistics Enterprise which offers advanced omnichannel capabilities around picking e-commerce orders efficiently along with store replenishment and B2B wholesale orders, accurately, pack the right carton or parcel to right order and seamlessly manage shipments to carriers. All while being integrated with existing systems for inventory, order management, accounting and online storefronts.
“This profile allows us to pick out an individual order in a dedicated area, instead of having operators moving around the entire warehouse. Zoning our warehouse has offered us significant efficiency gains with picking rates and the Microlistics WMS supports this,” Daniel says.
Brand Collective has approximately 40 different tasks set up in the Microlistics system. “The software allows us to take less time to pick and order, but also allows us to be agile and change workflows with the click of a button. With so many brands, it’s hugely beneficial to be able to redeploy resources accordingly,” Daniel says.
Daniel says the Microlistics team are great to deal with and he is impressed with the proactive approach they take with Brand Collective. “We have had such a great experience with Microlistics and look forward to growing our business further into the future with them,” he concludes.