Davie Ventures

James and James facilitates rapid growth

Industry
Fashion

Davie Group started in a small warehouse in Adelaide, South Australia. Davie Fogarty purchased a small amount of product from a supplier and was carrying out all of the fulfilment himself. Eventually, as sales increased a fulfilment partner was required, and as the company grew he started to look at setting up in locations outside of Australia. The UK was the first place he looked. As the company was not based in the UK, a fulfilment partner was required to break into the UK market. James and James was their first fulfilment provider in the UK and effectively helped them set up their UK trade.

How did you decide on a fulfilment partner? Was there a particular feature that made you choose James and James?

James and James were chosen for several reasons. Firstly it had great tech, the platform was great for the visibility of both customer orders and stock levels. It also offered tools for forecasting and inventory management. Secondly, the support offered was great. Being offered a client success manager, as well as a quick to respond support email, was a big draw point for us.

How did you find the integration with your platform and ControlPort?

The integration between Shopify and ControlPort was simple to set up with the help of the team at James and James. We were able to set up multiple stores/channels under the same account and manage them independently. The automatic syncing/polling of orders was also really great as we had found our fulfilment partner in AU was unable to do this effectively and required a lot of manual handling.

How did using a fulfilment partner help you scale?

To set up our own fulfilment centre in the UK during the early stages of our business would have been an extremely difficult task. Even if we had set up our own, independent warehouse our business grew at such a rapid rate that keeping up with orders would have caused major challenges. James and James’ already established infrastructure and ability to identify our growth and assign more staff to the fulfilment of our orders was integral for us to be able to grow the way we did. While there were times that not even James and James could keep up with our growth, overall we were able to scale a lot quicker with their help.

James and James’ already established infrastructure and ability to identify our growth and assign more staff to the fulfilment of our orders was integral for us to be able to grow the way we did.

Please can you tell us about how you expanded globally and any challenges you faced?

UK was the first market we expanded to outside of Australia. After the success we found in the UK we looked for fulfilment partners in Canada and the USA. Recently we have also partnered with 3pls in New Zealand and Europe (Netherlands). There have been many challenges along the way. Ensuring we had enough stock for our peak season has been a continual struggle, especially at the present time in which the global supply chain is extremely difficult to navigate. Brexit was also a huge challenge, and learning curve, for us as we had sold a large number of pre-orders into Europe and were unaware of how messy the situation would become with VAT/customs duties following Brexit.

Has this solution saved money and/or increased productivity?

I believe partnering with James and James has certainly saved money compared to what would have been required to set up an independent, fulfilment centre in the UK. It also allowed us to scale in the UK market at a much faster rate.