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British handbag and shoe manufacturer Jane Shilton, which has an annual turnover of some £20m, is on course to save 25 per cent of its warehousing and distribution costs, having taken on Howard Tenens for an initial term of three years.
On signing the deal its stock was moved from its existing 40,000 sq ft facility at Kemble Airfield into a 16,000 sq ft space at Howard Tenens’ 25 acre Europa Industrial Park site in nearby Swindon.
Paul Tandy, divisional operations manager at Howard Tenens, said: “This means saving money on storage by paying for a fixed annual allocation of space that’s sufficient for the average volume of product flowing through the facility, but then renting overflow warehousing as and when it’s necessary to cope with any fluctuations. So hardly a single square foot is ever wasted – if it’s being paid for, it’s being used.”
Managing director David Shilton, said: “We were paying for enough square footage to cope with the larger volumes whether we were using it or not.”
“We had managed our own in-house Distribution Centre ever since the company started – but we felt we should be spending our time paying attention to designing, selling and marketing our product. How it gets from source to the end user was better left to a specialist.
80 per cent of its product range is refreshed every six months. Howard Tenens now manages store deliveries and online order dispatch.
Djati Roebijanti, buying director at Jane Shilton, said: “18 months into the contract, we’re completely confident that Howard Tenens has proved itself capable of helping us to achieve the cost savings of around 25 per cent that first tempted our board to switch from the in-house solution to a third party logistics operation”.
Jane Shilton and its Cellini, JS by Jane Shilton, Pulse and Alex Shilton brands are also sold in overseas markets such as Russia, Scandinavia, Asia and the Middle East. The business employs 20 staff in its London office and operates 55 department store shoe concessions, as well as a further 8 stand alone shops, plus 5 factory outlets throughout the UK.
