Since they were founded in 1792, Startrite have built a reputation for being market leaders in providing quality children’s shoes. Still based in Norwich, they recently celebrated being in business for 230 years, and through eight generations Startrite still remains a family business today. They supply over 400 retailers throughout the UK and now have a keen eye on their ever growing E-commerce business.
The Project
Startrite were manually packing their online orders, often consisting of multiple pairs due to the size and width offerings, designed to deliver the perfect fit. As a result they experience high return rates adding considerable cost to their e-commerce operation. Like others they understand growth in home delivery is inevitable so recognised a need to streamline their processes and control costs.
Objectives:
1. Reducing cost of packing materials
2. Reducing labour involved in the packing / despatch process
3. Improving branding on e-commerce orders
A final challenge was to not only future-proof for natural growth in this sector, but to have ability to deal with a surge of orders over their annual 2 to 3 month ‘back to school’ peak trading period.
The Solution
An integrated solution was to required to handle all single, 2 and 3 pair orders. Ideal for this was an automatic Bagger fitted with an integral Labeller to apply the Carrier label and bespoke middleware to manage data and print.
Creating a bag out of a single roll of film delivers significant material savings and the automated process eliminates a percentage of labour.
Bags created are quality, secure and branded with multiple Startrite logo’s in a scatter-print fashion and also printed with the necessary safety warnings.
Packrobat had successfully partnered on previous e-com projects, so the same team of manufacturers combined again to deliver the overall Startrite solution.
We also provided an army of purpose designed and built e-com (and wholesale) picking trolleys, work benches.
For the future additional packing capacity and a small sortation unit could assist Startrite in keeping up with demand.
System Delivered
- Automatic inline Bagger
- Hand-held Scanner
- Print & Apply Labeller
- Middleware (superseded with Royal Mail real-time data handling)
The system has capable of processing up to 15 orders per minute.
Customer Feedback
“A ‘can do’ attitude, great product and an amazing team ensured that the project was delivered on time, within budget and to specification. Now fully operational we have reduced our average small order processing time from an average of 3 minutes to 15 secs! ”
Claire Greensides – Head of Operations