Mintsoft X Kecks: What Does Peak Season Look Like?
We spoke to Ed, Kecks' founder, to see how peak season affects their business.
Who are Kecks?
Founded by Ed Warren, Kecks are a men's and women’s underwear brand – selling a range of items including socks, clothing and accessories.
What does Peak Season Look Like?
For Kecks, peak season works in two ways. Besides Black Friday and Christmas, each month, Kecks releases limited edition pieces that don’t restock once sold out – making every month a busy period.
Challenges of peak season
Like a lot of ecommerce brands, Kecks face the risk of not ordering enough of a winning SKU. While the majority of Kecks' pieces are limited, they do have core items available year-round, causing them to calculate demand during the busier times.
Not only do they worry about stockouts, but the team must also keep their couriers in mind. During peak season, customers will lean towards 24 hours/next day delivery, causing the team to get orders picked, packed and shipped promptly – while considering that couriers are facing an increase in parcels, which potentially leads to slower delivery times.
Peak Season Planning
In preparation for Black Friday & Christmas, Kecks begins to buy stock in the summer, which arrives in September/late October, giving the team enough time to rearrange the warehouse and have the shelves stocked by the end of November.
Forecasting demand can be an educated guess. Because they release so many limited pieces, it can be hard to know which is going to be the next big winner. Ed pulls data from their ecommerce integration, Shopify, and Mintsoft to help figure out what could be their most popular item.
To coordinate with couriers, the team will log deliveries in the system to notify mail providers of upcoming deliveries. However, the Kecks warehouse is three doors down from their courier, often allowing them to get deliveries on the truck earlier if there’s space – helping the drivers as well as the Kecks team.
“Our checklist for peak season is, one, make sure we've got plenty of stock, two, plenty of packing supplies, labels and so on. And the other thing is just making sure that we've done a good stock check.” – Ed Warren, Owner
How Mintsoft Helps With Peak Season
Stock Takes
Mintsoft’s Stock Take feature has been vital for Kecks. Rather than constantly checking stock counts, the team can easily identify which items are running low and reorder before peak season hits – giving the team confidence that they won’t oversell, undersell or forget about stock sat in bins.
“Stocktaking used to be quite a painful experience for us because there was never a clear way to do it. But with the new module, it's much easier. You can start the stocktake, pause it, go away. If it’s still on the scanner, you come back and pick up where you left off. Stocktaking for us is always like an end-of-the-day thing.
The way it is now maybe would save us hours a week, I would say. It's way more accurate than doing it how we used to do it. We used to do it with a lot of CSV work and printing sheets off and location contents checks. By the time you maybe got around to doing that, you'd sold stuff out of location, so it never tallied up anyway. The new module's amazing. Fantastic.”
Batch Scheduling
Batch scheduling is regularly used by Kecks. Rather than manually reviewing what items need to be picked, Batch Scheduler will determine what needs to be picked & in what order before the team arrive.
“That saves a massive amount of time. We know when we come in, go and pick all the singles straight away. You can race around and do them. Then we'll move on to the multi-tote orders and the multi-item orders. It’s perfect; if that got turned off my account, I’d be upset!”
Eradicating Errors
Ed also owns EW53, a 3PL in Leicestershire, which operates out of the same warehouse as Kecks. Customer products and Kecks products are located next to each other, and with multiple items in multiple bins, picking errors can occur.
“If we come to pick, let's say, a pair of socks, and the person in the warehouse picks up golf balls that are in the same bin and scans the barcode, it will stop them straight away. It won't allow them to continue to the next step. Same with if you pick something from the wrong location or stock something in the wrong location, you get an error on your scanner.”