Interview Arnout Marck | erve.shop
A peek behind the scenes of our webshop
Licensed apparel in just a few clicks
After launching earlier this year, erve.shop has made licensed apparel available to our customers in just a few clicks. Webshop manager Arnout explains the process of getting the store off the ground (during exceptional circumstances!) and why it’s been a great success for retailers.
Interview with Arnout Marck
1. What is your role at Erve Europe?
I’m Arnout and I’m responsible for the webshop at Erve Europe. I have been working at Erve Europe for almost a year now and wow, what a year it has been!
When I began at the company, erve.shop was an idea and only part of the development had taken place. In a few months’ time, we managed to create a fully functional webshop with lots of options and possibilities that make it easy for our customers to buy the items they want.
2. When was erve.shop launched?
We went live with the webshop on May 12, so Belgium just came out of a full lockdown. We would normally celebrate the launch with a party in the office, but we all had to celebrate from home. However, the COVID-19 situation made a webshop especially useful for our customers: since producing high-volume orders of clothing takes a lot of time, and it’s less clear what the market will look like when your goods arrive. With erve.shop, our stock is delivered within one working week, so you buy goods when you need them and reduce your risk.
3. Who is the webshop for and how does it work?
erve.shop is a B2B webshop. We wanted to make sure customers could buy our goods regardless of their order size, from single carton orders to full container load (FCL) purchases. We made the webshop easy to use, simplifying the customers’ purchase process as well as our logistics processes. Benefits for customers include 24/7 access to our inventory with full price transparency, and the ability to order at any time. The webshop also shows our future production delivery, enabling customers to plan ahead and reserve items. The store actually functions as simply as the B2C webshops we all know. The only difference is you buy cartons of items instead of one piece.
4. What was the reaction to the launch?
We did a soft launch with our webshop. We informed our customers and gave them simple instructions on how to use it. We were very happy to see that all of our existing customers made the shift to the webshop and they all seemed to like the improvement. Thanks to this soft launch we were able to really coordinate every order in our system and make sure that everything went as smoothly as possible. This helped us to find potential issues and solve them immediately.
5. What are the best-selling licenses, brands and categories?
Difficult question! We have a lot of products that sell well. We always try to see which licenses and brands are relevant for our customers and, of course, take into account that these items need to remain relevant for a long time because during the production of the products and the transport to our warehouse, quite some time goes by. For kids, Disney articles like Mickey and Minnie Mouse are always very popular. Next to those, PAW Patrol and Spider-man. For adults, we mostly receive orders for Lotto and Basic Elle in socks and Lee Cooper Originals and Kappa in underwear.
We are expecting Dickies boxers to arrive in our warehouse soon! We are really looking forward to that and expect it to be a huge success!
Read more below these pictures
6. What are the future plans with the webshop?
We want to grow it, of course. We want to be able to offer our products to all companies who look for licensed and branded wholesale clothing. And we’re always looking out for new directions in which we can excel – for example, with today’s emerging technologies around garment printing, I believe we could become major players with such innovations as print-on-demand.
In any case, our offer always needs to be accurate and relevant, so that is something we constantly focus on: offering the best brands and licenses on the market.
Contact us
Visit our webshop here: erve.shop or contact Arnout directly via arnout@erve.com
