Customer focus
At work with
TheWorks
Tell us a bit about your business
Howhave you benefited? We’ve seen a significant
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TheWorks stocks over 40,000 different products including
reduction in packaging and carrier costs and an improvement in our
books, toys, gifts, stationery and arts and crafts and sells themat discount prices. We serve over 22.5million people each year, including families and people of all ages and sell over onemillion products every week to customers looking for a bargain. It’s a big operation and distribution forms a central part of this, particularly for our online business. What do you findmost challenging? Because we are a discount store, minimising costs without compromising quality standards is essential. With over 30million orders a year, we need access to an infrastructure that is extremely cost-efficient and that’s able to respond quickly to seasonal fluctuations. It can be challenging at times so working with a delivery partner that can offer that flexibility, expertise and supportive account management is really important to us. Q
pack performance. Our account manager has also been really supportive and it’s that close working relationship that has really helped us to drive new efficiencies. …and the results? We’ve seen an increase in delivery reliability and efficiency which we’ve been able to convert into cost savings per shipment of between 10-15% against previous couriers and 6% overall improvement on packing. growing at a rapid rate. We were sending 100%more packets (from3,000 to 6,000) per week within just 18months, reaching 11,700 packets per week at our peak in 2016. As we’ve grown we’ve developed a really close working relationship, creating solutions that have enabled us tomake our operation muchmore efficient, cost-effective and able to process greater volumes. It’s this close partnership combined withWhistl’s deep understanding of our business that’s made the relationship work incredibly well. Q What do you think has worked best? Our relationship withWhistl started when the business was
Many customers describe shopping at Britain’s leading discount retailer, TheWorks like entering an Aladdin’s Cave because of the thousands of interesting and unusual products on offer. With over 20million customers and such an extensive range of products available, a delivery operation that runs like clockwork is an essential part of the business. Here we asked Peter Jowitt, Distribution Operations Manager at TheWorks, what challenges the business faces and why its relationshipwith Whistl works so well.
And howhasWhistl helped youmeet these challenges? Whistl introduced a tailor-made carrier solution for our large
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letters and small packets and identified how we could redesign our packaging to enable us to sendmore products through their network at lower cost.
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Whistl Magazine • Autumn 2017
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