In the past few weeks, The Perfume Shop, the UK’s largest fragrance retailer, has been testing and has officially launched its new cutting-edge warehouse automation system at its warehouse in Dunstable processing hundreds of customer orders with high success. The new system will lead to improved efficiencies with 3 times quicker processing of customer orders and a reduction in packaging of 40%.
£2.5M has been invested by The Perfume Shop into these industry-leading automated packaging machines in order to:
● Further accelerate The Perfume Shop’s commitment to reducing the environmental impact of its outbound supply chain.
● Future-proofing distribution capabilities and operations to enable The Perfume Shop to continue to provide great service and always meet their delivery promise both to stores and customers.
● Reduce trailer fill and reduce packaging by 40%
The Perfume Shop selected Breathe Technologies to design and deliver an integrated solution comprising both conveyor and machinery together with Breathe Orquestr8 Software execution and control system.
The packing machines will be able to fold boxes to the size of the content included, reducing the overall cardboard and parcel size. Not only this, but the cardboard used is made in the UK and is 90% recyclable. Overall with these new innovations in place, it will mean a reduction in reduced carbon emissions as less delivery trucks will be required on the road.
Last year, The Perfume Shop sold over 500,000 fragrances in the week leading up to Christmas, with their busiest day for the website being December 10th with over 31,748 bottles sold. As a result, alongside the new website re-platform, the automated packing machines will be able to further advance the businesses customer growth.
Gill Smith, managing director from The Perfume Shop, said: “This scale of investment demonstrates The Perfume Shop’s commitment to our customers, our communities, and our colleagues. While we remain committed to delivering a brilliant customer shopping experience, we’re also seeing our e-commerce business move from strength-to-strength.
Investment into warehouse automation will ensure we’re keeping up with the increasing demands of our online business.”
The Perfume Shop has seen a growth in online traffic, and expects their e-store to deliver around 28% of their sales this year with growth vs last year. Automated packaging which increases The Perfume Shop’s packing capacity to over 1,500 orders per hour will also help meet current and future growth in customer demand for both online and offline products and services. With the festive season now over, the ‘golden quarter’ saw one of the biggest trading periods for The Perfume Shop, delivering approximately 50% of the businesses total sales.
