Clipper Logistics Group

The Customer

Major high street fashion brand New Look has come along way since its first store opening in Taunton in 1969. The retailer’s fashion empire has grown significantly to include over 1000 stores worldwide, in the UK, Republic of Ireland, Middle East, Singapore, Russia and Poland. Last year alone, over 355 million customers visited New Look via its on-line and high street stores.


The Challenge

In October 2009, New Look was undertaking a substantial new store opening programme and the retailer approached Clipper Logistics to support its ambitious Store Builds Programme.  The activity involved receiving stock into the Clipper processing warehouse over a period of 4 days from Monday to Thursday, and then despatching to the new store on the Friday, ready for the store opening the following week. The work undertaken in this period was to include:

•    Clothing
o    Un-box and hang all clothing
o    Arrange clothing in Brand, Style, Colour and Size
o    Create Store Sets for each Style/Colour (these were shop floor ready and have specific quantities of sizes)
o    Over bag remaining clothing into Stockroom sets
•    Accessories, Lingerie, and Footwear
o    Un-box
o    Sort into departments
o    Re-box and Label
•    Loading
o    Delivery vehicles were loaded in a specific manner according to the design of the new store to allow for easy unload and store merchandising.

The volume of stock to be sent was dependant on the size of the new store & whether it is store relocation. On average the volume of stock was between 20,000 and 40,000 units.  A recent flagship store build had a total of 91,000 units, which needed to be processed and despatched within the same time constraints.

The Solution

The New store opening process is successfully managed over 4-day period, during this process,
all of the necessary pre-retail requirements are taken care of by Clipper prior to the products arriving at the store.

As part of the process Clipper has introduced a number of initiatives to significantly improve operation and service to the stores, including the ability to quality inspect/audit the products before sending to the store, relabelling and size cubing, removing any stock pre delivery that it is deemed to have been over allocated, and maintaining product in an over bagged manner pre opening to present the new store in a pristine state – all of which creates a seamless store opening in a very timely manner.

From a New Look DC perspective the new store could start to receive pick allocations as soon as it was set up on the WMS – and therefore all processes could continue without the need to segregate new store merchandise.

In the period to May 2011, Clipper has completed 37 new store builds and continues to be New Look’s supplier for this service.

Pat Lee, New Look group operations director, commented: “This solution is a tremendous benefit to the New Look business and has streamlined the complex process of new store openings – another good example of why we chose to work with Clipper.”