A global B2B wholesaler selling outdoor recreational gloves in 1,200 U.S. retail (a total of 5,500 globally in 26 countries), Hestra provides 24/7 access to its catalogs and ordering system to enable sales reps to help their retailer buyers to place orders at their convenience, during and after business hours.
With the help of a new inventory management platform from NuORDER, Hestra was able to achieve significant results in six months:
- A 20% increase in pre-season B2B sales;
- A 15% increase in re-orders; and
- A 30% to 40% increase in the number of SKUs ordered, amounting to more than $3.4 million in additional revenue.
Hestra also reduced its ordering time by several weeks after introducing NuORDER’s barcode scanning feature, according to Dino Dardano, President of Hestra USA.
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Barcode Scanning Accelerates Order Management And Sales Processes
Hestra uses the barcode feature to build custom digital order proposals for each retail buyer. When retailers and representatives submit orders, the system registers their purchases into the NetSuite ERP system in real time. NuORDER then displays the product information and levels, as well as the “Available to Sell” inventory, ensuring that inventory is available to fulfill all orders.
The scanner helps Hestra facilitate orders during important industry tradeshows, through a system Hestra refers to as “mock orders.” “At our tradeshows, we have what we call a ‘mock order’ [where tradeshow buyers can pre-order gloves presented at our booth],” Dardano explained in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “As people go through our booth and check out our merchandise, we simply scan the barcode on the select glove they’re interested in, and it creates an order draft that shows up in their inbox by the time they leave our booth. All they have to do is enter or adjust the sizing of the gloves and hit submit, and we’ll have a hard order in our system.”
Improving Order Speed And Accuracy
Prior to working with NuORDER, Hestra was constrained with paper catalogs; and sought a process to build sales presentations for industry tradeshows, while improving overall inventory and order accuracy.
“To be competitive in our space, especially in the world of snow sports, we have to deal with a lot of challenges,” said Dardano. “Among all of our collections we have more than 9,000 SKUs. The cost, time and resources required to print catalogs every year was a major pain point for us. Our production cycle is about six months…our tradeshows usually happen in January, and then within 30 days we have to collect orders from all our customers, so it was a fire drill trying to estimate what we needed to order for the season and get things into production.”
Dardano also noted that because Hestra serves a large geographic area across the U.S., sales reps don’t have the time to visit every retail store multiple times per year to collect orders and re-orders.
“We needed a tool that would help facilitate our re-order business throughout the season, and be able to get the products on the shelves quickly,” Dardano said.
Sales Reps And Retailers See Results With NuORDER
Hestra reached its order and inventory goals following a quick and smooth NuORDER implementation period.
“I was actually amazed at the adoption of our rep force with minimal training — just two hours,” Dardano said. “The takeaway that really surprised me was how many reps used the tool the first year, and were able to submit orders, and get them to us in a much quicker fashion than in the past. Back then, we would use an Excel order form and chase the retailer to get the order fulfilled.”
Upon rolling out the platform to its rep force, Hestra then introduced NuORDER to all its retail buyers. Hestra uploaded its list of buyers into the NuORDER database and invited the retailers to login to the platform and order merchandise. The company offered incentives to increase retail adoption of the platform, and provides additional discounts during the busy winter sales season to onboard more retailers.
