How APG &Co Accelerated Digital Transformation with Shippit

If you haven’t heard of APG & Co, you have definitely heard of or shopped from their fashion brands, Sportscraft, SABA and JAG. APG & Co have a 50 year history of curating Australia’s most well-known fashion brands. Most recently, they’ve turned heads in the retail industry with their innovative approach to digitally transforming their fulfilment strategy.

With such an iconic collection of brands under their belt, APG & Co has worked hard to maintain the authenticity and relevance of their brands, and their product teams are constantly seeking feedback from customers to ensure their inventory meets the needs of each different target market.

APG & Co has worked with Shippit since October 2019 to help them open up more inventory to online shoppers, including within their concession stores at David Jones and freestanding stores.

In this case study, you’ll see how Shippit helped APG & Co:

• Open up inventory from free standing and concession stores
• Turn on distributed fulfilment for over 90 locations in less than a week
• Reduce the reliance on warehouses for online orders
• Improve their customer service by giving individual stores access to customer dashboards

Shipping from both free standing and concession stores

APG & Co moved to a ship-from-store model over three years ago, and as their strategy grew, they realised there was a need to make more inventory accessible to customers online.

Definition

Ship from Store: A shipping model that allows sellers to leverage inventory in their physical stores and make it available to their online shoppers. Also referred to as distributed fulfilment.

Majority of APG & Co’s stock is stored in their David Jones concession stores and free standing stores, so they needed a solution to help them scale their online sales without increasing inventory levels in their warehouse.

Their goal was to increase their share of online sales from 15% to 50%, and the best way to do this was to open up stock from physical locations to online shoppers.

During the recent events of the global pandemic, APG & Co experienced an increase in online sales of nearly 200%. They saw an opportunity to increase the number of stores that fulfilled online orders from 80 to 200.

Once APG & Co saw what the online space could do for the growth of their business, they engaged Shippit to help them switch on more locations as mini distribution centres. Take a look at how they achieved this ambitious growth strategy

Why did they choose Shippit for their ship-from-store strategy?

Before using Shippit, APG & Co used Temando. But when Temando closed down, APG & Co looked for a solution that could help them focus on online sales, while also empowering stores to be more responsible for the orders they were shipping to customers.

One of the main benefits Shippit provided was the ability for each store to have access to their own shipping dashboard, as well as access to customer support for deliveries and parcel tracking capability.

APG & Co also experienced improvements to the time it would take to serve customers. Nhung Tran, Logistics Manager at APG & Co states:

“We’re able to serve our customers better from a reporting side – and thanks to Shippit’s tracking features – we know where the stock is and where the freight is and we can open up more stock.”

“Some customers also know where the stock is coming from, and they’re able to contact the store directly to find out about their orders.”

Staff are trained to use Shippit’s tracking and dashboard features as well, and according to Nhung this has reduced the load on the support office as “Stores can go back and access previous consignments, as well as track a customer consignment if the need arises.”

Individual stores are also trained to contact Shippit directly for customer enquiries, so this really reduces the time it takes to serve customers looking to find out information about their delivery.

How did it work?

When the global pandemic resulted in the retail sector being locked-down, APG & Co decided to open more inventory through free standing stores.

This enabled them to test the strategy and validate whether or not it was worth expanding to their concession stores in David Jones.

“We opened up the inventory to free standing stores first because it was our own staff fulfilling orders and it was easier to do it then. If we used our concession stores first, we’d need to ask David Jones staff to fulfil our orders within their space.”

APG & Co needed Shippit to help them activate 90 new stores for fulfilment within a week – when normally it would have taken one month per store.

Luckily, APG & Co already had the right inventory management system in place, and once Shippit activated the new fulfilment locations for them, all they had to do was train staff, deliver satchels, and make space to print manifests and shipping labels in one area.

What were the results?

Although APG & Co were content using Temando, once they made the switch, they realised how much they could grow their online sales with ship-from-store capability.

“We wanted a company that was more innovative, and when Temando closed it was an easy decision because we knew what Shippit could do and help us with”.

So far, APG & Co have experienced significant growth in the online space, including:

Fulfilling more online orders from stores

Before implementing this strategy, APG & Co wanted to increase the number of online orders fulfilled in-store from 35% to 50-55%.

Optimising fulfilment location

One of the biggest benefits of a distributed fulfilment strategy is that it allows retailers to fulfil orders from the closest location. This allowed APG & Co to save transit time and shipping costs.

Ready for on-demand delivery

On-demand deliveries are seen as they holy grail in retail circles. With ship-from-store, APG & Co are looking to test the on-demand waters to see if it works for their business.