The company fulfills all orders using a drop-ship-only model. The company wanted to provide its customers with even better and faster service by shipping directly from their own warehouses. At present the company has first-hand experience in dealing with multiple fulfillment platforms.
The company has added special ships today icons to its print catalog and Website to identify items that are available for immediate shipment.
Spotts said that about 5% of NBF’s total sales are coming through the three warehouses even though they’re almost 100% utilized. But the plan is to beef that up to about 30% by 2012. It will require an expansion of each of the three DCs to nearly double their current size and a second expansion after that to add roughly another 30% of warehouse space. The expansions will be achieved by pushing back walls in the existing facilities and no new construction is planned.
The Austell, Georgia, facility has an area of 42,000 square feet (sft) the Reno, Neveda, facility measures 57,000 sq. ft., and the Cranbury, NJ, facility measures 56,000 sft. All are racked with 30 feet of storage to the hanging iron.
NBF was acquired by K+K (Kaiser + Kraft) America, a subsidiary of German conglomerate Takkt AG, a business-to-business direct marketing company of office, business and warehouse equipment in Europe and North America. Takkt decided to open three new warehouses to be shared by NBF and another one of its other sister companies, Topdeq, which also specializes in office furniture.
Dean Stier, marketing director of catalog brands for NBF said, “Part of our Perfect Service Initiative at NBF is providing our customers with popular products that arrive quickly and in great condition. Stocking our best-selling items in these strategic locations allows us to improve the service level to our customers.”
The difference between using a domestic manufacturing base, versus importing, is that “if you have a hiccup in the production cycle in the U.S., you could do what you need to do to get that product back into stock and sent out. But if there’s a hiccup in China, you could be out six, eight, ten weeks, depending on how backed-up your supplier is. We’re still drop-shipping a majority of the SKUs. We just got into warehousing and right now we only have 265 SKUs in the warehouse. That’s out of tens of thousands of SKUs.”
He said that the company which gets a lot of big orders through government contracts and educational institutions will continue to ship a majority of its merchandise direct from manufacturers. For the most part the new DCs which are being leased will be used to fulfill smaller orders.
Jeff Spotts, director of logistics for NBF said, “Ten years ago, most of the merchandise was still made in the U.S., which meant the drop-ship model worked pretty well. But now, more is being made in China and Mexico, so a lot of furniture distributors have had to move to a warehouse and fulfillment model. They’re now receiving their merchandise via containers.”
Spotts said, “The three new warehouses are managed by Topdeq personnel and we pay a transfer fee for each item we sell. Although the two brands are separate, NBF is contemplating working with Topdeq in the future. We’re exploring the possibility of bringing some of their products in with ours.”
