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| Online, with Style |
July 12, 2005 |
By Karen Hall
Online clothing stores have typically failed, as shoppers are reluctant to buy clothes they can’t try on.
But Justwhiteshirts.com has a model that works.
Eight years ago, the world of non-store retail was very different. When three friends decided to launch a company to sell white dress shirts, the business operated through a paper catalogue, mailed to potential customers.
By 1999, only two short years later, Internet retail had arrived and Justwhiteshirts.com was created.
Today, with fewer than 10 people on staff, the company operates in a blended bricks-and-clicks model. Along with its successful online operation, the company also opened a retail outlet in Toronto.
“I think the important thing is that we were a catalogue operation before we were anything else,” said David Stewart, chairman of Justwhiteshirts.com, who invested in the company in 1999 and bought out the three original owners last year. “This means we had the warehouse, we had the fulfillment capability and we had a shipping system and telephone customer service system. Many retailers do it the other way around — they are bricks and mortar first and then they back into the Internet or catalogue selling.”
With such a small number of people working for the company, Stewart said it’s a “pretty lean, mean operation. But we are looking for retail growth opportunities.
The beauty of being multi-channel is that first-time buyers (in the Toronto area) can go to the store, look at the clothes and touch them, and once they’ve done that we find they go multi-channel. Sometimes they’ll shop retail and sometimes they’ll shop Internet. So there’s still a tremendous value to having both.”
Today, the business does several million dollars in annual sales, and the Internet accounts for 45 per cent of that.
More than shirts When the company first opened in 1997 it only sold white shirts. This continued for a year or two, Stewart said, but when people began to gain confidence in the company, it broadened its offerings to include sweaters, ties, cufflinks, pants, socks and different kinds of shirts.
According to Stewart, the company is focused on the Canadian market, with its largest customer bases in Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and Montreal, in that order.
“Business teaches you that you have to focus and service your customers very well rather than spreading yourself too thin,” he said. “So, if anything, we’ve retrenched out of the U.S. a little bit and we’re refocusing on the Canadian business.”
E-com advantage
Without the option of going online the company would be a traditional retail business, Stewart said.
“And I think we would be much weaker.
We’d be a smaller company competing along more traditional lines. We’d probably have to be more of a conventional menswear retailer, selling suits and jackets.
But because the Internet opens up a bigger market, we can specialize in the accessory lines. So when we send our (electronic) flyers out to our customer list, which has more than 20,000 names, we can roll in on the following Monday morning and have a bunch of orders from Calgary, for example.
It’s a very nice feeling. We couldn’t possibly do that without the Internet.”
Communicating with this large customer base through e-mail has become a major part of the company’s strategy, Stewart said.
“We interest people in products or we invite them to the store using e-mail,” he said. “So very often we’ll point out certain deals that are only available at store level, or vice-versa. And that’s one major way in which the business has changed — we talk to our customers much more frequently.”
Because Web selling was young when the company first went online in 1999, the corporate site has since evolved.
“We re-engineered our Web site substantially a few years ago and it’s now a much faster, more efficient system,” Stewart said. “But I would say we’re still learning and one of the things we’re learning is how to do suggestive selling. Very often people aren’t great coordinators of shirts — a lot of men don’t do that well. So we’ll say, ‘If you’re buying this shirt, here are a couple of suggestions for ties.’ And there are a lot of opportunities in that sense.”
But in its basics, the site has been stable for the last two or three years and it works well, he said. “We haven’t messed around with it too much because people develop a familiarity with the site and they don’t want you to keep changing it on them, other than the product you’re offering,” Stewart said. “It’s a conscious decision now to keep it quite simple. It’s compact and it’s fast.”
Web site development and maintenance is all done internally.
“We have a very expert IT person and a very expert graphic artist in-house,” Stewart said. “So we save a lot of money that way. Our business is about delivering value to the customer and if we can keep our costs down in all these areas, this translates to a better price for them.”
Customer relationships
What advice does Stewart have for others looking to take their businesses online? He said it’s important to make the investment and the commitment.
“Customers expect a high standard of service,” he said. “So if a company is going to go online, do it with the intention of spending some money and doing it right, otherwise customers will snuff you out. They’ll find out that you’re not totally committed.”
Stewart also said it’s important to make it easy for customers to go through the selection and checkout processes.
“We think our Web site is quite efficient and attractive,” he said. “We have a real-time inventory system. We can look up a customer’s previous order because often people forget what they’ve ordered.
It comes up on the screen and instantly we can tell them what they bought and we can also tell them instantly if a product is in stock or not. If someone e-mails an order we acknowledge that order within 24 hours, so he knows immediately that the order has been received and if there are any issues, like if it’s out of stock, for example.”
It’s this type of customer service that builds trust, Stewart said. And people’s expectations are conditioned by what they experience buying from other Internet retailers, such as Amazon.com.
Eric Harbottle, who has been a customer of Justwhiteshirts.com since before the company went online, is impressed with the customer service.
“Whenever I’ve had an issue, they’ve called immediately, they’ve followed-up and they’ve dealt with my problems very efficiently,” he said. “One of the concerns with e-business is the service issue, but they’ve dealt with me very well on that.”
Harbottle, vice-president of finance at the University of Windsor, has an 18 1/2 inch neck, so he can’t buy shirts off the rack.
“Now Justwhiteshirts.com has all my measurements, so I just go online and order what I need,” he said.
Harbottle said he usually orders from the company every three months, and is confident in Justwhiteshirts.com’s security system when it comes to paying online.
“We’re assured that the company has very good encryption and we’ve had absolutely no problems,” he said.
So what does the future hold for Justwhiteshirts.com? Stewart said the company is going to stick to its niche but offer additional products, such as jackets and blazers.
“The thing with clothing is it’s always potentially a problem, because people like to try things on. But fortunately that applies more to women than men,” he said. “Men typically like to shop fast, make quick decisions and move on. The Internet lets you do that.”
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