Havaianas turns digital trade into major sales channel with partner

FLIP-FLOP company Havaianas continues to be a toppreferred brand in the local market as sales continued to grow, especially on the digital marketplace amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Looking back, however, running an end-to-end fulfillment operation on its own was among the biggest challenges the brand has had to face.

According to Havaianas e-commerce lead Christine Brunermer, what their customers saw in their e-commerce store was inconsistent with what they actually physically held in their warehouse. This was because they had separate systems—one for the web store and another to manage the warehouse inventory. They also had to lead, teach and manage the people picking and packing orders, a timeconsuming job for the e-commerce team who already had their hands full.

This delayed the delivery to take 15 to 30 days before an order reached its customer. Since nextday delivery was the norm at the time, complaints and requests for order cancellations increased from impatient customers. Such demanded manual intervention of the customer care team.

Gearing up for the National Flip Flop Month in 2021, Brunermer and her team knew it was time to change their approach to online trade and turn it into a major sales channel.

Fortunately, they had enlisted a fulfillment partner by the time the 8.8 flash sale came around. With their partnership, what the team usually did manually became automated. “Now with Locad, we are able to dispatch orders within 24 hours and deliver super fast shipping to our customers,” she said, pointing out the cost they put in has paid off with high productivity and efficiency rate of their partner.

“From paying for our own real estate, managing that real estate, hiring people to cover x square meters of that real estate—all of that has been lifted from us and now we are only looking at the cost per unit.” Apart from costs, their partner has saved them valuable time as full integration of its Control Tower to their own system has allowed them to view data that are retrofitted to the metrics they are looking for.

Brunermer and her team were pleased also to see the large and positive impact of outsourced fulfillment on their customers and feedback. With both end-to-end fulfillment and workforce management off their plate, their operations have now been upskilled and they are more focused now on project management.

“[Locad’s] system has a way of purging information and showing exactly what we have so it’s super transparent and credible, and at the same time it’s very custom and very much in tune with what the retailers actually need,” she stressed.