Brand Attic

Brand Attic is part of Visage group, concentrating on the EU apparel category, and is the name behind brand names like AM London, Anita & Green, Threadbare and Fashion Union. Brand Attic is constantly evolving its offerings to surpass its customers’ expectations on quality, service and price. Established in 1981, Visage has created a reputation for quality, innovation and competitiveness in the UK and European retail clothing market. Providing a breadth of services from design to manufacturing and distribution, Visage offers quality clothing at exceptional value accompanied by the best in customer service. An in-depth knowledge of the apparel sector built over more than 30 years ensures that Visage is a company to trust. Built on strong foundations, the group prides itself on close integration of its manufacturing resources, unique import and distribution channel, experienced management team and committed staff. Visage is part of LF Europe, a Li & Fung Company.

Category: Fashion
Challenge: Margins; Multichannel
Results: 250% year-on-year growth in year 2
Benefits: Save 4+ staff through automation

Margins & Multiple Channels

Andy Buckels is Marketplace Manager for Brand Attic: “We were looking to increase our routes to market and were keen to protect our margins in the business. The natural candidate for this was to go direct to the consumer and set up an ecommerce presence.

“We wanted to go on Amazon, eBay and Magento. Clearly we needed a platform to do this. We had discussions with 3 providers. We went with Volo because they had the most complete platform. It was a better investment for the long term. We could get more out of the system from the start: the reporting, warehouse management, and the channel integrations.”

Full Service Benefits

“Volo enables you to sell on as many channels as possible. This is good for us because we want to add more channels and regions next year. With Volo we’ve 1 bank of data, and we can send the information to channels every which way we want to send it. It means we don't duplicate work.

“You can perform lots of bulk commands, like for example using the automatic repricers. You can get through a lot in a short space of time. On the support side, the responses are quick, we get successful resolution of tickets too. We have the help we need and our Customer Success Manager is always there for advice. You have to act fast in ecommerce, so their overall service is a strong point for Volo.”

Saving Staff, Growing the Business

“We’ve 12 people in the ecommerce side of the business. The Volo system saves us between 2 and 4 additional staff, if not more, and that’s just on the data side. We also save on the order processing side too. A lot of our staff use the analytics module a lot, for sending out reports on sales and the like. Their feedback is very good. There’s nothing missing on the information, it gives us everything we need.

“We started from zero about 18 months ago. We now have about 30,000 SKUs, and operate a parent-child SKU hierarchy. Remember that we were building an online brand from scratch, so it took us a while to build the business. Once we were ramped up, the growth was very strong. On a monthly basis we're now running at about 250% year-on-year growth.My advice to others is 100% to give the training and learning-on-the-job your full attention. The Volo system is a massive piece of kit, so make sure you get all the value out of it. I’m learning new stuff about the system every couple of weeks; I’m always finding time-saving things. It will 100% do what you need, and if you're not sure, ask. You’ll get the support, and get the most out of Volo.”