Joules

Joules is a clothing and homeware company with a reputation as one of Britain’s best-loved lifestyle brands. Tom Joule started out 30 years ago by selling clothes at outdoor events – quickly realising that, while his customers were a bright and colourful bunch, their clothes were quite the contrary. Since then Joules has given its products broad international appeal, delivering significant sales growth and further expansion across channels, product categories and target markets.

The Challenge

Joules needed a flexible logistics solution that would support wholesale rest-of-world growth, while also having the potential to help their UK operation process goods more efficiently. They chose to partner with SEKO Logistics to manage their international expansion and year-on-year growth plans, and also to give their merchandisers and buyers unprecedented real-time visibility of Joules’ growing supply chain. 

The Solution

SEKO manages deliveries from all sourcing locations in Asia to Joules’ UK distribution centre and to the US, including managing all customs and compliance requirements. The service also involves managing the global supply of products to Joules’ other wholesale markets through their Hong Kong warehouse – as well as receiving deliveries from suppliers in China, and managing the direct fulfilment of customer orders outside of the EU and US markets. Meanwhile SEKO360's DCM PO Management function gives Joules complete supply chain visibility, enabling them to automate dispatches and control distribution costs – and full integration with SEKO360 WMS module creates ‘plug in’ opportunities to use SEKO’s warehouses globally.

Benefits of the SEKO solution

• Management of Joules’ entire global supply chain through a single web-based portal
• Significant transportation and fulfilment cost savings
• Faster container processing at UK ports by monitoring supplier compliance
• Real-time visibility of peak season shipments to optimise capacity at the UK distribution centre
• Enabling growth across all sales channels and into new international markets
  
  

The Result

In the first twelve months of working together, SEKO managed over 10 million product units for Joules. In addition to growth in the UK and US, Joules has continued to expand its global footprint, using SEKO’s warehouse in Asia to fulfil wholesale orders for customers in markets including Taiwan, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan and Australia. In the second half of 2019, Joules reported a 14% rise in store sales, a 16% growth in retail sales and a 19% year-on-year boost in ecommerce sales. International revenues over this period were up 26%, to represent 11% of the company’s total business.