Booming baby business nurtures fulfilment with Peoplevox WMS

Founded in 2008, Hello Baby is an online retailer selling a wide range of products for the 'pregnancy to pre-school' market.

Operating out of a 7,500 square foot warehouse in St Albans, the retailer handles hundreds of orders every day. From the website there are over 3000 nursery products from over 120 leading brands. From Avent to Zoggs, the company offers everything necessary to get from pregnancy to pre-school including a range of ethical baby items.

A speciality is quality wooden toys and stocks products from the leading European manufacturers Brio, Heimess and Le Toy Van. For parents and babies with more contemporary tastes it also sells the Lamaze range of colourful learning toys.

With consistently excellent customer service an utmost priority, Hello Baby dispatches most items within 24 hours and offers Next Day and world-wide delivery options.

The Fulfilment Challenge

In 2016, the company's continued growth necessitated the move to a larger warehouse. This also placed increasing emphasis on the importance of ensuring that the retailer's high level of hard earned customer service excellence reviews was maintained.

At the time Hello Baby was using Volo Commerce for a variety of e-commerce services, including warehouse management. However, while very happy with the system overall, the retailer was finding it increasingly challenged by its growing warehouse management requirements.

Founder and Managing Director, Trevor Ginn, was conscious that fulfilment consistency was becoming an issue and starting to impact certain areas of his business. "It wasn't that the system was bad, it just wasn't optimised the way we wanted it to be, and we knew there had to be a better solution out there," he said. "We were already quite good with picking and delivering on time but around peak times in particular, we were struggling and we knew it was time to upgrade."

The Solution

Hello Baby decided to evaluate the market and selected the Peoplevox software as service (SaaS) based Warehouse Management System (WMS), not least because of its integration capabilities with Volo Commerce.

"We could see straight away that this system would be able to provide us with the solution we needed," said Trevor. Equally important, the Hello Baby was really impressed with the Peoplevox Implementation Team during and after the implementation period. "Not only did they help us with implementing the actual system, they also gave really good advice on general warehouse management and best practice."

The Results

Hello Baby is now fulfilling 500 orders a day, something that Trevor explains would have been very difficult without implementing the Peoplevox WMS.

"Peoplevox has helped us cut down picking errors by 80%," he said. "We now know where things are and we have much more accurate stock levels than we have ever had before."

The retailer also explained their warehouse staff is now much calmer, the system has helped them organise a more structured way of picking items and it has helped them speed up picking.

Further Expansion

In 2017, with the help of the fulfilment efficiencies achieved by using the Peoplevox WMS, Hello Baby will embark on significant expansion. This includes increasing the range of products offered online as well as opening its first shop which will allow a far wider range of wheeled goods, car seats and furniture to be made available.

This year will also see Hello Baby increase its online marketplace by selling on Allegro in Poland, Seller Fulfilled prime on Amazon, and Amazon Mexico.