My name is Cathryn Hondros and I am the Vice President of Systems at Wacoal America. Wacoal
America is a premier manufacturer of women intimate apparel and our claim to fame is
fit and comfort for women. We have offices at Headquarters in Lynhurst, New Jersey we
have showrooms and sales offices in New York City in the apparel district and also manufacturing
plants in the Dominican Republic as well as another sales office in London. Approximate
employees on our payroll are around 300 and we ship about 3500 cartons a day.
I am Karen Mertz, I am Director of ecommerce for Wacoal America and I came on board early
this year with the initiative of launching our first direct to consumer website wacoal-america.com.
Our web site is set up to both sell direct to consumer and educate women.
Wacoal decided to launch a web site basically because for a number of reasons. Number one
is when we work with department stores, a department store may or may not carry our
whole line so a lady who goes in to purchase our product has a limited choice of what is
available to her. The second thing is that we have our own story about our claim to fame
being fit and comfort and how our bras satisfy that and satisfy our customer and that may
or may not come across our whole story complete or as complete as we would like in department
stores. Plus there are always the opportunity that when you are selling direct as opposed
to through someone else, you have an opportunity to improve your margins. So those were the
drivers of why we wanted to go ahead and develop a website and go direct to consumer.
And then we started thinking about what do we want the consumer experience to be?
So, we knew we had to provide the consumer packing lists. We knew we had to provide labels
for the consumer, we knew we had to provide a lot of different things but we also did not
want it to be just a mess of papers in the box that was very confusing to her. So we
came up with the concept of wanting to put all of these documents onto a single sheet
so that when the customer opened the box, she would have all of her paperwork in one,
nice, clean, organized fashion. Once we knew we wanted to do that, we were looking
for something that could print a single sheet, we wanted something that we could have labels
that we could peel off of that we could use, we wanted something that was not going to
rub off and put colors on our light colored garments, so all of that led us to a SATO solution.
Ismael Vicens, our Director of Distribution,
was at a trade show and he saw this printer and said, this is something we
should investigate. So, we began working with SATO at that point. We designed the form
that we wanted to do, we figured out how many printers we needed to use to get started,
what the configuration was we integrated them into our IBM I-Series system and basically
set up the process to print this beautiful, clean sheet on a SATO printer.
My name is Ismael Vicens. I am the Director of Distribution for Wacoal America. We run
what is called a Picking wave for all of the Wacoal direct orders that have come
in over night and when we run the wave, it creates/generates a pick ticket for ever single
order. This is what a pick ticket looks like and it has a carton identification which is
a UCC128 label. It got the items, the information at
the top who it is going to and then it got the items that are in that package listed
in picking order, so that when it goes to the pick/pack operator, she will be able to pick
each item with her scan gun. What they do is they take their RF gun, they scan the UCC128
barcode which is the carton identification, they go to each item and they scan the item
to make sure they are picking the correct item. When they have scanned the last item,
they are done picking with that particular pick ticket.
This is, later on, it is going to be used when they go to pack the garments, they will
put it on the inside lip of the carton and when they put it on the inside lid of the
carton, they will then be used to scan that UCC128 when they put it on the weigh scale
in order to generate the packing slip and the return label.
Once they are all picked up they go to a special area where we have our new SATO
M10e printers and we line the carton with tissue paper, we place the garments in it
and then, as we are filling up the tissue paper, we scan that original pick ticket and
that immediately prints out the packing list for the customer, it prints out the shipping
label, it provides the customer with a customized return label and we put that information,
into the box after taking off the shipping label and affixing to the outside.
Once we have done that then that carton will go on our regular UPS or USPS manifest,
whatever the customer selected for shipping and we ship it out through our normal shipping
processes. When we weigh the carton, this prints out
of the SATO printer. We call this the collate sheet, because it includes,
one, a packing slip at the top which shows in detail for the customer what we are shipping
to them. It has a return label for USPS return. When we pay the return for any returned orders
through the United States Postal Service and their merchandize return service, it has a
shipping label depending on how the customer has selected to ship the order, we have a
shipping label that is either USPS Ground, or UPS Ground, or Next Day Air, Second Day
Air but this is used after we pack the carton to put it on the outside of the carton in
order to ship with. We have here an extra label right now we are
just printing our Wacoal logo on it but in the future it can be used to print gift coupons
or some other advertisement, so it is there pending for whenever we need it.
On the reverse, what we have our return instructions where if the customer has to
return something to us, it asks for the reason for their return giving them some suggestions
here, the quantity they are returning and the item they are returning and we use this
in our returns handling process so everything is together in one simple sheet when we pack
this product and we are ready to close this box, we remove this packet, this shipping
label, the rest of the sheet is folded and placed in the carton and it goes out to the
customer, and then when the customer receives it, they know exactly what they have and they
have instructions in case they need to return it. We ask that they return it in the same
carton but even if they do not, they have a label to put on whatever form they decide
to return it to us. SATO supplies us with the form and the printer
and SATO installed and made sure that it was working. They came over when we first started
working with it. Printers obviously were new to us. First time we had dealt with this printer
but from day one they came in, they showed us how to use it, how to load it, fine tuned
it to work with us and everything keeps clicking away.
The solution that we have integrated, I think is a great solution. Today, of course,
our web site has just started up but we see it already growing and I think the way we have
designed our solution with the integration starting with the front-end system up until
we print that final packing slip with our SATO printer. We have set up a solution that
is going to scale very nicely. I know that with the printers that we have in place, we
can handle many, many times the capacity of what we are doing today and if we grow beyond
what the printers that we have on hand can do, I know I can add more printers to that
fleet of printers and just continue to grow our capacity to sell on the internet.