Yours Clothing brings plus-sized fast fashion to the high street across its 130 stores nationwide, supported by a thriving online presence. With ambitious expansion plans, this discount-led retailer is reactive to the market and not one to miss an opportunity. Working with the Yours team since 2019, we support the Yours business in delivering operational improvements that increase efficiency and boost store success.
A complex retail business, we initially engaged in conversations with Yours’ Retail Director to uncover every part of their store and wider operations to understand the challenges faced. Such challenges included:
Matching immediate priorities against our experience and capabilities, we began to address problems one at a time based on the impact felt by the Yours business. Embarking on a steady roadmap of projects, over the last three years we have partnered with Yours to resolve each of these issues. With an exciting roadmap of new innovations ahead, our partnership with Yours Clothing remains strong as we continue to support their ambitions to improve efficiency and store operations.
A heavily promotion-led business, keeping on top of the latest offers posed a great challenge to in-store teams – completing pricing tasks had taken over. The current in-store pricing solution was manual, inconsistent, and time-consuming leaving little resource for other tasks.
To save the Yours team substantial time, we demonstrated Label Print – part of our Label IQ solution – designed to automate pricing tasks and bring consistency to in-store labelling. Following a successful trial, the benefit was clear and Label Print was implemented running on a Zebra TC21 device paired with a ZQ610 mobile printer across all stores.
Warehouse operations were hindered by mobile devices that could no longer last a full shift. Taking so long to power up and update, speed and efficiency was a problem. It was time to invest in a device refresh.
Introducing 120 Zebra TC51’s which boast a hot-swappable battery ensures that, even in the years to come, Yours have a reliable device that will last a full shift.
Stock movement and its impact on margin was a priority. The amount of time spent manually handling stock to meet demand and maximise opportunity was an immediate problem. Absorbing much resource, each time a product is moved additional courier costs are introduced.
With an in-store team that is highly skilled at the packing process, we introduced Yours to our Pick IQ solution. Leveraging the same in-store Zebra mobile device as Label IQ and a Zebra ZD421 desktop printer, Yours can now access and pick stock from any store location and ship it to the customer or even provide a local store collection service.
Online orders couldn’t be processed in-store due to a lack of order data visibility. With regular offers, aggressive promotions and discount vouchers running in parallel, it was impossible for store colleagues to work out the right amount to refund. This saw goods being sent back to the central warehouse by the store for returns to be processed creating a poor customer experience.
Supporting a full omnichannel experience, Pick IQ also includes a Web Returns application. Integrated with Yours’ central system, store colleagues can now process returns in-store providing a unified omnichannel experience that meets customer expectations. Linked to their central system provides an additional business benefit; without a fleet of vehicles, every time a product is moved further cost is introduced. Now, staff are instructed what to do next with the item – send it back to the warehouse, keep it in-store to sell or even dispose of it if it’s damaged. Yours is in greater control and can save margin by avoiding unnecessary courier costs, all while reducing pressure on their warehousing team who can focus on their eCommerce channel.
Yours rely on the support of third parties for their logistics, including store deliveries. This created stock accuracy issues as soon as items leave the warehouse with boxes going missing or delivered to the wrong place. Because of this, store stock accuracy was suffering and store colleagues were unaware items were even missing due to a lack of visibility on what stock to expect in their deliveries.
Bridging the gap between stock leaving the warehouse and arriving in store, delivery receipting functionality has been implemented as part of our innovative Stock IQ application. Store colleagues have gained visibility of due deliveries, able to positively receive goods to the store either by scanning at a box or item level. This robust process has empowered colleagues to quickly identify if anything is missing and allows it to be reported back to the courier. Important from both a cash and margin perspective, this ensures that products aren’t attributed to its stock file where they haven’t been received.
Stay up to date with the latest in retail technology with news and insights sent straight to your inbox.