From Minutes to Seconds: How Chinese Laundry Slashed Order Processing Time in Half

Background 

In 1981 women’s wholesale footwear manufacturer, Chinese Laundry, started selling shoes in department stores, boutiques and other traditional retail outlets.

To meet growing demand for their footwear, Chinese Laundry built and launched their first ecommerce website in 2010. The homegrown ecommerce platform struggled to operate as an all-in-one solution, managing all workflows and systems in one single platform.

The workflows built into the ecommerce platform were an extension of their brick-and-mortar operations, which resulted in difficulty scaling to meet growing online demand. They quickly realized their homegrown solution wasn’t going to meet their long-term goals.

 

Challenge 

As their business continued to grow, the in-house ecommerce solution that began as an extension of their brick and mortar strategy was unable to scale and provide an omnichannel experience for customers. The shoe company identified two pain points in its ecommerce strategy:

• Lost sales due to slow order processing – Chinese Laundry was processing orders per minute, and they needed to process orders per second to stay competitive with delivery and return standards set by ecommerce giants like Amazon and Zappos
  
  
• Lack of visibility across teams – All departments from customer service to distribution and finance had trouble locating customer and order information, increasing order transaction times and human error

 

Solution

Implement Deck Commerce Order Management Solution (OMS) to automate order-processing workflows and provide a view of the entire order lifecycle to all employees, therefore reducing time spent processing orders manually. The OMS had to seamlessly integrate with the new ecommerce storefront built on Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC).

 

Results

• Increased employee productivity
• Improved order visibility and software adoption across teams
• Implemented order management solution and Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) storefront integration on time and under budget