Bonpoint is a speciality
retailer of luxury childrenswear, with stores in many of
the world’s designer shopping destinations.
After opening its first boutique in Paris about
thirty years ago, the brand has grown to become
the children’s clothing equivalent of other
prestige labels such as Dior, offering everything
from pants, perfume and poupées. Today, the
retailer has around 50 stores, in select locations
across Europe, the US, and Arab Emirates. The French
retailer acknowledges that a large chunk of its €30
million annual revenue comes from the dominant French,
UK and US markets, where the childrenswear market
is estimated by Mintel at a staggering $28 billion.
Further expansion is anticipated next in Asia, and
notably Japan, where the retailer is currently only
present through concessions in department stores
and independent retailers.
The company designs all its clothes
from its Paris head office, working with suppliers
from all over the world for production and distribution.
But because of the challenges of operating a growing
retail business in such far-flung parts of the globe,
and so that it can support its international markets,
the company decided to invest in technology which
would give the retailer greater foresight in both
planning and communication.
Improving Communication
Links and Customer Service
Bonpoint selected an integrated head
office solution from European retail
software vendor, VCSTIMELESS.
The IT solution, called the Colombus
Enterprise Suite, helps the retailer collectively manage
the movement of stock between stores; as well
as to and from its 8,000 m² central warehouse
in Ivry sur Seine in France. The software offers
various analytical tools which can be used to
allocate specific merchandise to certain stores,
based on how sales have been performing across
the estate. It also gives a simple means of communication,
so that if, for instance, one store wants to
know if another has an outfit it has sold-out
of, then store staff can easily check and so
avoid a lost sale.
“The luxury childrenswear
market is very much about offering excellent
customer service,
so if a customer asks for a certain size or style,
we like to be able to satisfy them quickly and
efficiently,” commented André Huitorel,
IT Director at Bonpoint. “We needed an elaborate
retail system able to cope with managing an expanding
international business. In addition, for our stores,
we needed a simple-to-use solution which looks
slick enough for a top-end fashion retailer.”
Managing
an International Business
Huitorel also acknowledged the importance of a
multi-lingual and multi-currency system when
running an international retail business. He
added that it plans to install a new IT module
from next year, Colombus
Regional, to give greater
autonomy to stores outside of France, where currently
everything is centrally controlled. This next
phase of development is due for completion by
the end of this year, with particular emphasis
on the US, where longer distances for shipping
make regional autonomy more of a priority.
Colombus
Regional will eventually give all overseas stores,
exclusive online access to a sophisticated
mix of integrated retail technology. It will provide
instant links for own-label stores, concessions,
or independent retailers to the Bonpoint head
office system, giving up-to-the-minute information on
available merchandise, suggested pricing, or even
the time it will take to replenish a store. It
effectively offers a scaled-down version of the
head office system, but based on the specific needs
of a particular market.
Increased Profitability
and Time Savings
Streamlining the retail operations is something
Huitorel sees as saving the company thousands
of pounds, as well as bringing it up-to-speed
with other retailers’ systems. He said
that stock taking is also massively simplified,
with around a million articles recorded in the
system, and only about one per cent ever lost.
“Markdowns and discounting
have been minimised as a result of better planning,” said
Huitorel. “It’s
partly down to the technology that we haven’t
had a bad year for such a long time, as we’ve
been able to manage both distribution and production
so much more efficiently. Buyers can react to sales
regionally and make sure that we don’t get
left with too much stock at the end of a season
in one place, and too little in another.”
Another benefit of the system is in its ability
to make sense out of very complex fiscal arrangements,
which vary from country to country (or in the US,
from state to state), which also have an important
bearing on price. This means that store staff don’t
have to get too involved in the peculiarities of
tax exemptions in certain locations, because the
technology does it all for them. For example, there
is no tax on childrenswear up to a certain age
in the UK; or tax is only added above specific
levels of spending in parts of the US.
“We’ve expanded
fairly rapidly on an international scale, and as
soon as we’re
properly organised in all our new outlets, we can
expand even more,” said Huitorel. “With
everything controlled from Paris at the moment,
distribution and communication is just too complicated.
Colombus Regional will allow us to overcome this,
and then we expect to be opening more boutiques. ”
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