Brightpearl quenches Wineware’s thirst for improved retail management operations

A polished experience

Wineware specializes in glassware, wine racks, corkscrews, wine cabinets, decanting products and numerous other wine accessories. It has been trading online since 2000.

The company has been growing from strength to strength and is now one of the leading wine accessory suppliers in the UK, supplying thousands of individual customers and hundreds of hotel, restaurant and bar clients, as well as wine and whisky tasting clubs. No matter who it’s selling to, Wineware offers a premium service.

Lynsey Wellman, Company Director at Wineware, explained: “People expect a very high standard these days. We want to ensure we offer the best experience and the best journey to the highest standard – to make every customer happy.”

Putting the stopper on inventory errors

Wineware had an old and outdated Sage package, implemented in the early 2000’s that wasn’t keeping up with the growing demands of the business. In 2014, the retailer decided a change was needed. Wineware was increasingly growing its ecommerce activity and soon realized that the existing Sage package could not offer the retailer what it needed.

“The operations platform wasn’t gelling or working. Stocktaking was far too manual and too slow. Our old system had accuracy issues, which started to impact our inventory picking and meant that sometimes inaccurate information was being displayed on the website. Live inventory figures are available for our customers to view online, so it was vital this problem was addressed as soon as possible.”

“The tipping point was dealing with Sage errors and crashing, which meant we were working the solution harder than it could cope with – Sage is fundamentally an accounting package but we required more than that,” Lynsey continued.

As with all other retail brands, it’s essential that Wineware maintains a smooth order fulfillment process, to ensure the business meets customer expectations. There is a lot of pressure on the company to turn around orders in mere hours, as company service commitments allow customers to place orders by 3pm to go out the same working day. In order to deliver the best possible service, and for the business to stand out from its competitors, Wineware needed a system that could keep up with these increasing demands on speed and convenience.

A corker of a platform

Wineware decided that investing in a retail operations platform was the integral next step to its future business success. After assessing what was available on the market, the retailer decided that Brightpearl offered the strongest solution to meet its business needs.

“Since we’ve started using Brightpearl, it has made our lives a lot easier and we haven’t looked back,” said Lynsey. Brightpearl gives Wineware greater insights into sales processes and tracking. The Wineware sales experience is very different between selling to trade customers and selling to everyday end user consumers. Through the Brightpearl platform, the software ensures seamless management of both processes – and helps manage and forecast orders for both channels.

“This helps us identify our sales spikes, and which products are most popular with which audience,” Lynsey added. “We’re getting extra business insights through the Brightpearl platform, which helps us sell to customers better.”

Brightpearl has also helped optimize Wineware’s order fulfillment. The retailer is now able to get orders out a lot faster – hours earlier when compared to pre-Brightpearl implementation, which helps the company meet late cut off orders successfully.

This has translated into positive feedback on popular consumer review websites. Wineware has an ‘excellent’ five-star rating on Trustpilot, with many consumers referencing the speed of next day delivery in their positive reviews of the brand. “Brightpearl has ensured we’re offering our customers a seamless shopping experience, which means we’re continuing to receive great reviews and ratings,” said Lynsey.

With Brightpearl, Wineware is also now able to monitor, through its various selling channels, which products are performing best on each channel. “We also sell on Amazon and eBay. Our channels all plug into Brightpearl, which is where the software really comes into its own. You’ve got the inventory levels on there and one screen that displays the products selling through the various channels, and how it’s selling. With over 1,800 products in our portfolio, this is really important to us, and we wouldn’t be able to function without it,” Lynsey said.

A rosy future

The future is looking bright for Wineware. Lynsey sees Brightpearl as an integral part of Wineware’s continuing business growth and is particularly impressed with how often Brightpearl automatically updates and improves its software. This, in turn, enables the company to continually offer its customers an industry-leading shopping experience.

“Brightpearl will help us grow and expand because of the functionality and software that we now have in place with the platform. We don’t know what’s around the corner, but the Brightpearl software has given us confidence that we are well setup to be responsive and adjust our business plans, no matter what happens. We are looking forward to the future, and to seeing what new functions Brightpearl can offer us,” concluded Lynsey.

www.wineware.co.uk