Luxury Brand Navigating E-Commerce Debacle Due to Automation Failure
The White Company had to apologize to furious shoppers, who say they've been left waiting 'weeks' for deliveries. Enough for its CEO to make a grand apology to its customers on social media. Just how problematic were the White Company’s recent logistical delivery woes?
Luxury lifestyle brand The White Company is feeling the wrath of some of its most loyal customers this week, after shoppers say they'll ditch the upmarket brand over extensive delivery delays.
The high street and online chain, founded by Chrissie Rucker in 1994, is famous for its expensive bed linen and upmarket homeware accessories - often in shades of white or neutral colors.
However, the company has been losing fans after a supply chain and logistics fiasco left people claiming they've been waiting weeks for deliveries, despite the money being taken from their accounts at purchase.
On the brand's social media accounts, disgruntled posts have begun to appear recounting painfully slow deliveries and poor customer service, sparking an apology from the company's CEO Mary Homer.
"We are really sorry,” chief exec Mary Horner has announced on Instagram. “A few weeks ago, we started the process of moving to a new distribution centre. It hasn’t gone as smoothly as we planned and some customers are experiencing delays receiving their online orders. We know this isn’t good enough.”
The fashion and homewares retailer is now in the process of “working as hard and as quickly as possible" to resolve the issues and is “contacting everyone affected to explain the situation and to offer a refund”.
And to minimize any further disruption, the retailer’s also temporarily removed all delayed products from its website, “meaning that our online range will be a bit smaller than usual for a few days”.
CEO Mary Homer added: “I am truly sorry that this has happened and I want to thank all of you for bearing with us while we get back to the levels of service that you, our customers, expect and deserve.”
And damage limitation can be a powerful tool, as even some shoppers who had complained of waiting weeks for their items, took to social media to applaud the company for its transparency.
One shopper wrote: “This means everything to impacted customers… Bravo for your transparency.” Another called the honesty “refreshing”, noting that “communication is key”.
Omnichannel logistics is a key part of any retail operation and many retailers have been hit hard by such problems. Dr Martens, for instance, had ongoing issues with its new distribution center in LA that harmed its US sales for some time.
Luxury retailer END. also had big problems linked to a new automated fulfillment system. Its new inventory stocking system was implemented mid-year and was meant to improve inventory management but the integration with existing systems didn't quite work out as planned. It had to reduce marketing and promotion activities in order to slow down website traffic and took a multimillion-dollar stock write-off.
In 2022 the UK premium lifestyle retailer The White Company extended its contract for multi-channel fulfillment services with its 3PL partner for a further five years which included additional automated services and other online e-commerce services. The 3PL provider had recently implemented a very large and complex automated system that included a state-of-the-art goods-to-person system along with a very complex advanced modern software solution.
Those services included international e-commerce order fulfillment, store replenishment for its footprint of over 60 stores in the UK and Ireland, and value-added services for around 1.6 million customers annually.
Initially, the 3PL managed The White Company’s existing UK warehouse facility and then migrated the retailer’s central warehousing and distribution operations to its own “state-of-the-art fully automated e-fulfillment facility in late summer 2023.
As part of this move, the 3PL said it would introduce “further customer experience improvements, operational capabilities, and support capacity for growth, implementing higher levels of automation to drive efficiency”.
The plan was for The White Company to utilize a significant proportion of the new automated capacity, its 3PL provided.
As part of the move, around 175 workers, primarily engaged in fulfillment and warehousing services, transferred from The White Company to join the 20,000-strong 3PL team as part of this partnership.
The automated facility measuring 528,000 sq. ft was designed to deliver highly automated online fulfillment services to multiple clients, reducing unit costs and shortening lead times in response to the rapidly changing demands of the consumer. The 3PL was offering a new automated facility dedicated to delivering a ‘best-in-class’ customer experience, cost efficiencies, flexibility, and agility of shared user warehousing and transportation. Other cited benefits were full end-to-end fulfillment services: receipt, store, pick, pack, despatch, carrier management, and delivery enabled by a cloud-based WMS. The claim was “Future proof with unrivaled flexibility and new best-in-class fulfillment solutions.”
The 3PL facility was designed with a high level of sustainable initiatives through material-saving initiatives, using every inch of cardboard we get, and efficiently packing customer orders with no more wasted space! Also, all cardboard offcuts were reused into the padding to ensure “items arrive in the same condition they were sent in”.
