​Paul Smith links with Centra for e-commerce and digital wholesale boost

Paul Smith is ramping up its focus on its digital ops — from DTC e-commerce to digital wholesale — and allying it closely to its physical retail business as it aims to “create a seamless, global brand presence”. 

It’s been working with specialist fashion and lifestyle e-commerce platform Centra on the project and said the first few months have seen performance improvements across the board with teams now free to focus on the good stuff — like growing the business — rather than fixing things.

The company has been working on enhancing its digital ops for some time and transformed its digital flagship in 2022, transitioning to a headless front-end designed by agency partner Limesharp.

But it felt that the resulting much-improved online store (with a big focus on story-telling that emulates the in-store shopping experience) was let down by the existing slow speeds and other issues. We’re told the team also “faced several challenges streamlining and scaling its business because of its existing e-commerce platform. 

Given that it was looking for an order management solution (OMS) to facilitate multi-source inventory and global ship-from-store capabilities, the team realised this would present additional challenges.

Hannah Bennett, Head of Digital at Paul Smith, told Fashionetwork.com: “We were considering investing in an OMS software but realised we would still have to upgrade the platform and our development team would then need to build and support those features.  We’re a fashion brand; we need to be integrating solutions not building and maintaining software.”

It selected Centra because its “out-of-the-box functionality, across both its DTC and digital wholesale solutions, solved many of Paul Smith’s challenges in creating limitless, agile and scalable digital channels”.

Quick wins, but slow wins too

Bennett told us that the new tech integrates third-party logistics and supply chain so that was “the immediate win”. But the total package — “from operationally being able to consolidate how we could manage wholesale, grow markets with loyalty and VIP programmes as well as introducing new languages and currencies much quicker than we could ever do before and all from one site and centralised system — sealed the win”.

That speaks to the ongoing problem faced by many companies these days, especially independents. They may be experts in product design and marketing. They may also be experts in physical retail. But adding deep tech expertise into the mix is a big, expensive, potential minefield.

So it makes sense to make the most of external tech. The migration started with DTC but then took in the entire digital business – including digitising wholesale on the Centra Showroom. It means the brand’s global wholesale partners can now access the inbuilt digital wholesale showroom, “which modernises the buying process through a like-for-like DTC consumer shopping experience, including individual pricing, global tax calculations and shipping management”.

The end result is said to be that Paul Smith can now redeploy development resources “to focus on e-commerce development while its wholesale team can focus on enriching the buying experience for merchants”. It’s also about moving on “from maintenance to enhancement”.

Another key result is the product information management (PIM) capabilities enabling the company to get products to market quicker.

Site speed and reliability has improved, “with Paul Smith experiencing no down time since taking its DTC channel live in April”.

As well as consumers getting an improved offer, Bennett told us that internal stakeholders and global parters are happy with the development.

“They took the changes really well and [we] have had great feedback on speed, scale and UX. We staggered the release over two selling seasons to allow more time for training and managing any region-specific feedback (we have sales teams based in London, Paris, Milan, New York and Antwerp) – the biggest challenges being just terminology and account set-up, which obviously speaks highly for the intuitive design of Centra’s Showroom.

“Sales teams can prepare and share selections ahead of appointments, wholesalers can view remotely, as well as prospect customers. We also have the option of stock orders (rather than just forward order) for our wholesalers to buy directly to top up during the season. Appointment times and entering orders are much quicker through an e-commerce journey compared to multi-formatted documents”.