Background
Toyworld is Australia and New Zealand’s largest network of independent toy retailers and has been serving local communities for over 50 years through a member based model of over 150 stores, showcasing a vast array of leading global toy and hobby brands across an average of 400sqm premium retail floor space per outlet.
Toyworld support office makes available an import range to complement local brands available from globally recognised brands including Mattel, Lego and Bluey.
“Dealing with so many members directly for this import range is a logistical challenge”, said Toyworld General Manager, Sven Karlsson. “We have seasonal product releases which are tied to manufacturing deadlines meaning that we have little leeway in gathering orders and submitting them for approval”.
The tight manufacturing lead-times were further compounded by an inefficient order collation process requiring spreadsheets and PDF sent to members to collect orders.
“Each new release was quite a challenging process which took weeks to complete and was an inefficient process,” clarified Sven. “There was also room for error where orders were being double entered from a spreadsheet into a centralised purchasing platform from which the manufacturing PO’s were generated. “We simply needed a more efficient way to collect orders which provide our members more variety around product ranges and higher margin sales”.
Solution
Brandscope’s unique indent ordering system represented an opportunity for the Toyworld group to consolidate the ordering process onto a single, intuitive platform that integrated directly into the business’ M3 ERP for PO generation.
The system’s powerful templating functionality enabled Toyworld to create and distribute tiered online assortments (i.e. Buy Plans) to the relevant retail groups for fast order review and approval.
“The Brandscope Buy Plan Templating and assortment building function dramatically reduced the preparation time by at least 60% in constructing and distributing these assortments to our members in one hit and also made it much easier for them to review, collaborate with us to confirm their orders.”
Outcome
The primary goal was to expedite the product release and associated order collation process which was achieved on the first launch.
“We expected member engagement to be slow initially given the historical reliance on more traditional sales methods such as catalogues and spreadsheet order forms,” said Sven. “This simply wasn’t the case, with over 90% of our members immediately engaging with the tool resulting in manufacturing PO’s being placed on time”.
“The general feedback from our members was that that tool was quite intuitive and visual, with all the required and relevant information easily accessible to make the correct purchasing decisions”.
For the buyers, engagement also meant more immediate access to important data for internal POS and social media systems to expedite the sales and marketing process.
“Brandscope was a familiar system to our team”, summarised Paul Scott, buyer of Barossa Toyworld, “as we’d previously used it to purchase other brands. Having Toyworld on the system has made it a lot easier and efficient to place orders on new product lines and gather the required data to drive our POS and socials independently, instead of having to rely on HQ to feed the information through. We support a lot of brands, so it’s essential that we’re able to engage with them in a timely manner and support our business needs.”
“Having the direct link to our members means that we can now considerway to expand the product offering,” said Sven. “We can launch more product lines in tighter timelines to create instore diversity and drive marketing campaigns with greater immediacy and efficiency for the benefit of our customers and our own business. It’s been a great initiative and has fostered immediate dividends.”
Testimonial
“Brandscope has streamlined and energised our engagement with our members across the ordering and marketing process and has set the business up for a far more collaborative and unified member engagement with our import program in the future.”
