The Perfume Shop Streamlines Replenishment with Slim4, Boosting Customer Experience
As a one of the premier retailers in the UK, The Perfume Shop aims to deliver a smooth customer experience across all platforms.
The retailer is recognizing that the customer journey now typically spans both physical and digital realms, the concept of O+O (online plus offline) has become the new norm, reflecting contemporary shopping behaviors.
The outdated O2O (online to offline or offline to online) model of the past generation focused on channel transitions. In contrast, O+O centers on crafting a unified experience that meets customer needs, allowing seamless shopping across any platform at any time.
Lauren Seabrook, Head of Merchandising at The Perfume Shop, notes: “Given that Covid restrictions have been implemented at critical periods throughout the retail calendar, often with very limited notice, we have had to adapt our O+O strategy to the changing circumstances.“
Sean Wallis, Supply Chain Director at The Perfume Shop, adds: “Despite the recent disruption, we remain as committed as ever to provide our customers with the best possible shopping experience. However, to maintain consistently high levels of availability across all of our customer channels, our supply chain is an integral part of O+O retail, and it has had to become far more agile.“
Agile Allocation
The Perfume Shop has collaborated with Slimstock for several years. The successful integration of Slimstock’s inventory optimization platform, Slim4, has enabled The Perfume Shop’s planning team to build a robust system for forecasting, allocation, and replenishment.
Sean emphasizes the benefits of this partnership: “By working alongside us to support our stock management to achieve our O+O strategy, Slimstock’s expert consultants have worked as an extension to our team. With their continued support, we have been able to take decisive action to mitigate the disruption caused by Covid-19.“
“During Black Friday and peak trading periods, we made strategic decisions on stock placement to best support our customers and service levels, allowing us to provide an exceptional O+O experience despite store lockdowns,” Sean explains.
Slim4 facilitated the quick shift from central distribution, transforming impacted stores into micro e-commerce fulfillment centers. By strategically holding back inventory for online sales during store closures, the retailer met the rising demand for online orders. “We leveraged our physical store network to support our O+O strategy, delighting customers in a new way.”
As restrictions eased, the planning team quickly reallocated inventory to support the full reopening of stores.
Lauren adds: “By working in this dynamic way, we were able to ramp up our operations as soon as stores were given the green light to reopen. But more importantly, we have been able to fulfill a 200% increase in online orders, many of which were fulfilled via our stores. Ultimately, Slim4 has played an important role in helping us to maintain consistently high levels of availability across both our online and offline channels. Put simply, without Slim4, we would have required significantly more manpower to respond effectively to the changing conditions.“
Responsive Replenishment
Lauren discusses the challenges posed by COVID-19-related data gaps: “We depend on robust data insights to optimise replenishment across all our customer channels. However, with the impact of local measures such as the introduction of tiered restrictions and even one-way traffic systems in shopping centres, demand behaviour over the last few months has been extremely volatile in every store.“
Slim4 allowed the team to exclude affected periods from store-level forecasts, addressing these data challenges efficiently. Additionally, Slim4’s flexible forecasting engine enabled the planning team to use historical demand data to forecast future inventory needs accurately.
“With Slim4, we worked flexibly with our data to quickly determine each store’s replenishment needs. As a result, we’re able to ensure responsive replenishment,” Lauren states.
Next Steps
Looking ahead, Lauren highlights: “As we move forward from the impacts of Covid, we are well positioned to continue to leverage our O+O strategy that has rapidly grown and developed over the last 12 months. Slimstock has partnered with us to ensure our technology is aligned to our strategy and future success following the pandemic.“
Reflecting on the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sean concludes: “In what has been a turbulent period, Slimstock has offered exceptional support. As we pursue our long-term growth objectives, we look forward to further strengthening this partnership.“