You’ve heard the old saying: The only constant is change. Few industries have experienced as much change in recent years as retail, especially fashion retail. The best retailers have reinvented their business models to keep up with changing tastes and new consumer expectations. For many, that strategy has led to reinventing the way they replenish their stores and fill customer orders.
DSW Inc., one of the country’s best known retailers of shoes, footwear and accessories, is a case in point. The acronym stands for Designer Shoe Warehouse, but over the last decade, the Columbus, Ohio-based company has transformed itself from a closeout retailer selling last year’s styles at bargain prices to a specialty fashion retailer carrying this season’s styles. Today, only about 10% of the inventory is overstock merchandise. Product categories have expanded to include socks, hosiery, handbags, scarves and jewelry.
This evolution in the store demanded a new approach to distribution. “When we were an opportunistic close-out business, the range of sizes in the store wasn’t important because we didn’t know what we were going to get from a vendor,” says Jeff Girard, vice president of distribution and fulfillment operations. “As we began buying more direct, in-season merchandise from our vendors, we realized we could order the sizes we wanted and replenish the stores with the sizes and styles that were selling.”
To replenish by size, DSW implemented a broken-case picking and packing solution in its 700,000-square-foot Columbus distribution center. The facility is used for store replenishment; a separate facility in Columbus manages e-commerce sales.
The solution features a cross-belt sorter (Beumer Corp., beumergroup.com/en) installed on a 140,000-square-foot mezzanine that had once been used for value-added services. The sorter feeds 500 packing chutes—enough to dynamically serve DSW’s 394 stores and 356 leased stores located in department stores operated by regional chains such as Stein Mart and Gordmans. DSW’s capacity to replenish at the size level increased six-fold, and more importantly, productivity for that process doubled.
“The sorter will play a big role in our future growth,” says Girard. “As we embrace an omni-channel view of retailing, it gives us more options.”
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