Natural Baby Shower’s warehousing efficiency is born again with Brightpearl

The background

Natural Baby Shower sell a wide range of natural, organic and ethically made baby products. They’ve grown from selling their products off their kitchen table, to having 25 members of staff, their brick and mortar store, two warehouses, a Shopify Plus webstore and selling via multiple online marketplaces. Natural Baby Shower were even nominated in the Telegraph Independent Shop Awards and are well known for their affordable and long lasting product range.

Growing an omnichannel business can be very challenging, and looking after all these sales channels was becoming increasingly difficult to manage. We sat down with them and found out how they overcame these challenges and grew Natural Baby Shower into what it is today.

The challenge

“Before we started using Brightpearl, we were struggling to manage the back-end of our website which was our main sales channel at the time,” Clifton Vaughan, Director and Co-founder, told us. “We couldn’t keep track of orders, or who those orders were coming from. The lack of visibility into our business meant we weren’t keeping track of our inventory levels or serving our customers as well as we could have.”

“We pride ourselves on sourcing the best natural, organic and ethically made products,” Victoria Hampson, Director, told us. “Having the time to actually source great new products was difficult when we were spending so much time trying to manage the business logistically. It was really important for us to find the right system which would help us manage our business and serve our customers better.”

“Before Brightpearl it was all very manual and we were reliant on individual initiatives to get what we needed done. As our volumes increased, it was proving more and more ineffective,” explained Simon Hutchinson, Operations Manager. “We were relying on people to pick the right items which was very time consuming and left a large gap for human error,” Tanisha Prince, Customer Service Advisor added. “We used to come in in the morning and print out all of our goods notes, walk around the warehouse looking at SKUs and then manually match them up, remembering where they were located so it was really time consuming,” Lauren Pearce, Despatch Worker, explained.

“When we were looking for a new solution, it needed to scan barcodes, be quick, and be portable. We couldn’t keep running back and forth. We needed to streamline the process,” Tanisha explained. “We really needed more structure to our working processes and procedures so we would make less manual errors or miss any details,” added Simon. “Our manual warehousing process left too much room for mistakes.”

Key Challenges

• Difficulty keeping track of inventory

• Inaccurate inventory levels and disappointing customers

• Inefficient pick and pack process

• Lack of data and insight into the business

The solution

Natural Baby Shower weighed up the options and went for Brightpearl.

“Brightpearl allows us to manage all the areas of our business from one central place making us much more efficient so we are more organized as a business,” Clifton explains. “Brightpearl’s warehousing had everything we were looking for,” added Tanisha. “It enables us to keep track of our inventory in real-time so we know exactly how much we have at any given moment. Brightpearl has really revolutionized our warehouse management.”

“Transitioning our business and warehousing to Brightpearl was so simple. We had really good support centrally from Brightpearl’s implementation team. It was very, very smooth,” Simon told us. “We had some live training sessions with the team alongside some video how-to guides. It was really easy to follow,” added Lauren.

“With Brightpearl in place, everything is updated in real-time and we know exactly what we have in stock and we can turnaround our inventory much quicker,” Victoria tells us. “Brightpearl is easy to use, clean and intuitive. The responsive system helps us manage our inventory, purchase orders, customer data and a key strength for us – our accounting. Being able to see a live profit and loss statement of the business on a daily basis is amazing! It’s very useful for making business decisions.” Clifton added: “Brightpearl has given us great insight into our customer base; we can track returning customers and see what they are spending. Being very customer focused is really important to us – we love being able to look after our customers so well.”

“Brightpearl’s warehousing saves us a lot of time when we’re picking our orders and has reduced mispicks significantly,” Lauren told us. “Compared to before, our stocktakes and inventory counts are twice as fast now and a lot smoother. We just zap everything and because all our barcodes are on the system, it tallies them up for us. We used to have a manual tally chart which led to human error. We’re a lot more accurate now.”

“Using Brightpearl’s WMS allows us to eliminate a huge amount – if not all – of these mistakes and in turn, we can give much better service to our customers,” added Simon. “Our stocktaking process is far cleaner and far quicker than it ever was before. Having a proper structure allows us to deal with the exceptions very quickly.”

The future

“With Brightpearl, we’ve been able to delve in and analyze our business and now we know exactly how we’re going to grow it moving forwards,” Victoria told us. “Because we’re able to work more efficiently now, as we’ve grown we haven’t had to scale up our warehouse team as quickly if we were still using our old system,” Simon added. “We want to employ more people, but in jobs that are empowering – not boring,” Clifton said. “Brightpearl has led to increased speed and accuracy inside our system which has meant that the way we hire people in our warehouse has completely changed,” he explained.

“All our business processes have become well organized and streamlined – life is simply less complicated now. Brightpearl gives us the time back we need to spend buying and sourcing new products for the business. We can look for the best products at the most reasonable prices,” Clifton tells us.

“Our products are getting to our customers quicker, faster, and more accurately than ever before. We want to go on delivering the best products to mums by growing the online business and also looking into new sales channels. We want to be as flexible, efficient and effective as possible and with Brightpearl, we can do that,” explained Clifton. “I don’t think we could be where we are today without it,” added Tanisha.

Simon finishes by saying: “Brightpearl has helped us so much over the years and wherever we’ll be in the next five years, we’re sure Brightpearl will be there with us.”

www.naturalbabyshower.co.uk