A premier manufacturer of women’s intimate apparel, Wacoal America, decided to create their first direct-to-consumer website to sell direct and educate women about their claim to fame, namely, “fitting comfort to women”.
Wacoal America, headquartered in Lyndhurst, NJ, also has show rooms and offices in New York City’s apparel district, manufacturing plants in the Dominican Republic, and a sales office in London. The company ships approximately 3,500 cartons per day with most, up until now, going to department stores.
Why create a direct-to-consumer website? According to Cathryn Hondros, vice president/IS of Wacoal America, the driving forces were threefold:
- Stores that carry their products may not carry their entire line of products so customers have a limited choice of their products.
- Their unique message about fit and comfort and how their products satisfy that message and satisfy their customers, may not be being addressed or addressed the way they want it to be in the department stores.
- Direct sales improve profit margins and the bottom line.
“We started thinking about what we want the consumer experience to be,” said Cathryn Hondros. “We knew we had to provide a packing list, a return label, and instructions on how to return an item, and still leave room for our message or logo or special coupon. Also, we did not want it to be just a mess of papers in the box that could be very confusing to our customers. So we came up with the concept of putting all of these documents onto a single sheet so that when the customer opened the box, she would have all of her paperwork in one nice, clean, organized fashion.”
The single sheet document required a peel off label for shipping to the customer and a peel off return label for the customer. Also, the ink used to print the document could not smudge or rub off onto their products and stain light colored items such as their unique comfort-fitting bras.
The SATO Solution:
Cathryn Hondros continued, “Ismael Vicens, our director of distribution, attended a trade show and observed the SATO M10e printer and realized that it was worth investigating to find out if this printer could satisfy our needs. So, we began working with SATO at that point. We designed the form that we wanted to use and figured out how many printers we would need to get started. We also determined the printer configuration and integrated it into our current IBM iSeries system and basically set up the process to print this beautiful, clean sheet on a SATO printer.”
Each morning, a “picking wave” is downloaded for all the direct orders that were received overnight. It creates/generates a pick ticket which is a UCC128 barcode label with the carton identification for every single order. Each pick ticket identifies the items, where and to whom they are being sent, and the items that are in that package listed in their picking order. The pick/pack operator picks each item by scanning the UCC128 barcode, which is the carton identification, and then scans each item to ensure they’re picking the correct items.
The UCC128 barcode label is adhered to the inside lip of the carton. The carton is lined with tissue paper and the garments are placed inside. The carton is placed on the weigh scale and the UCC128 barcode label (the original pick ticket) is scanned, which immediately generates a printed packing list. This list identifies each item in the carton, as well as, the shipping label, the customized, postage-paid, return label (via USPS), the Wacoal America logo, which can be replaced with a gift coupon or special message, and on the reverse side the return instructions. The shipping label is peeled off and affixed to the outside of the carton and the single sheet, double-sided document containing all the information for the customer is put in the carton. The carton is shipped via UPS or USPS based on the customer’s shipping preference.
Ismael Vicens said, “SATO supplied us with the form and installed the printers and worked with us to ensure that everything worked as planned.” He continued, “The printers were obviously new to us, but from day one they came in, showed us how to use them, how to load them, and they fine-tuned them to work with our system. Everything is and keeps clicking away!”
“I think the solution that we’ve integrated is a great solution,” said Cathryn Hondros. Today, of course, our website has just started up, but we see it already growing and I think the way we’ve designed a solution that is going to scale very nicely. I know that with the printers that we have in place, we can handle many, many times the capacity of what we’re doing today, and if we grow beyond what the printers can handle, I know we can add more SATO printers to the fleet and just continue to grow our capacity and our ability to sell on the Internet.”
Watch the "Wacoal Application Story" Video |
