Name: Commerce Conversations: Peak Without Panic
Uploaded: 2026-10-20T15:51:17.549Z
Duration: 35 min 8 s
Description: Commerce Conversations: Peak Without Panic

Transcript for "Commerce Conversations: Peak Without Panic": Hi, everyone, and welcome to Commerce Conversations peak without panic. I'll give it just a couple seconds to let everyone join, and then we will get started. But thank you all for being here. Alright. Well, I am Jensen Bailey from Sage. And today, we are talking about how retailers can prepare their inventory and operations for peak, where pressure tends to show up first and what teams can still prioritize now. I am joined by Alice Davidson from TBCo and Day Conley from Sage. Alice has been with TBCo for more than four years and has nearly ten years of experience using Brightpearl across two retail businesses, and Day will be guiding us through our conversation today. We will also be sharing the recording after the webinar, so you'll be able to come back to the conversation and share it with your colleagues, and team afterwards. So, Dave, I will hand it over to you. Thank you, Jensen. I appreciate the introduction. Really excited to be here. We're excited to be here with you today, Alice. You have so much experience with Brightpearl. I think that's something that a lot of our customers and other people in the industry can really learn from. So, I know that you've been using Brightpearl for a really long time, and currently at TBCo, you're also using inventory planners. So, before we get going too far here, if you could just give us a little bit of an introduction, on TBCo and and what your brand does. And then can you talk a little bit about what peak season looks like at TBCo? Yeah. Absolutely. Great to be here with yourself as well. Really looking forward to the conversation. TBCo is essentially a... It's a design led fashion and lifestyle business. We create bold, easy to sell statement pieces, across a bunch of different categories, whether that's sleepwear, apparel, accessories, home textiles, like, you name it. We're all about, like, those big bold patterns and, yeah, kind of bringing joy to to your outfits and your home. And we're also a b corp, certified company, which we are really proud of. So I would like to throw that in there as well. It's something we worked really hard towards. But, yeah, that is, I guess, TBCo. We're an Edinburgh based brand. So we're based in Scotland in The UK, and we've been going for about, I think, eleven or twelve years now. And so we are fully fully integrated into the retail world at this point. And in terms of peaks for us, I like to describe peak as organized chaos, which sometimes seems a bit like dramatic. And chaos isn't always the calmest of words to use. But I think I... Every day is different during peak. You never know what's gonna happen on a day to day basis, especially from an operations team point of view, which is where I sit. New problems arise that you never even could have imagined would be a problem when you were planning for peak. But I think the organization and the prepping for peak that we'll obviously touch on today, that you put in in preparation for that kind of chaos means that instead of it being utter chaos, you're in organized chaos where there's so much going on. It feels chaotic, but you are able to stay calm and deal with the problems that arise because of the work that you've put in to kind of prepare for that element. In terms of, like, timeline for us, our peak is actually really long. I usually say it starts around October time. We are a brand that has focused previously heavily on woolen products, a lot of winter items. So we start to see our orders really ramp up in October time. And we kind of just continue that up push that trajectory until Black Friday, basically. And then after Black Friday, it feels like there's no there's no let up. We just continue through. We then have Christmas gifting sales. We have our January sale. And to be honest, it feels like mid February before we're kind of out of this, like, peak window, which is obviously, like, coming in October then. We're, like, four months ish of the peak, which feels quite a lot and obviously is probably longer than a lot of other brands who kind of maybe just feel that hit on Black Friday and and kind of the weeks before and after that. Yeah. I mean, that really is a long peak. I understand with some of the winter focused items that you have. I can see how that would definitely lead to a really long high peak season and a long time for for that. So that that that is a lot. That's definitely a lot longer than than just the the Black Friday type that that a lot of our customers see. But I I think we see this a lot with seasonal brands, but just curious, how early do you have to start preparing for that big peak? Not not to cause anyone any stress. I've not started preparing yet. But I guess, it's changed a lot in the last, like, three or four years with our growth that we've seen. But we actually stopped preparing for peak in March, which is basically the month after the last peak has ended. It allows us significant time as a business to adapt to... It means that we are reviewing our peak very... Like, just after it's happened, so no one's, like, forgotten what happened. Everything's very fresh, and then we can, like, set kind of a a timeline of what needs to happen in which months to make sure that we are as prepared as possible going into our peak in October. Yeah. That is that is really not much breathing room from the middle of February, and then it's... Or you're already planning for the next peak in a month. So Yeah. You know, that definitely sounds like organized chaos there. So what are some of the things that you're that you're doing to to really prepare yourself, and how has that changed from when the business... How the business operated previously in the last few years when you first joined? Yeah. I think, like, bringing that... Obviously, bringing that key preparation forward is something, like I said, like, it has changed a lot over the last few years. We probably start thinking about peak in, like, June, July time and realize that then we would, like, run out of time for what we wanted to implement or the changes we wanted to make. So that is why we had to kind of keep pushing that forward and forward to the point where we were then, like, actually, we come out of peak. We should start thinking about next peak and how we can make that work. I think the other element is kind of... We also have this kind of rule in place within the operational side of business where we don't make any big changes to processes, systems, kind of operational sides of the business from kind of September onwards if it can be avoided. And that is so that any changes we make have time to settle in, the team have time to get used to them before we are in that, as I mentioned, like, organized chaos. We don't wanna be putting a new process in place a week before Black Friday and then expecting our teams to be able to just adapt, pick it up, and it... For for it all to go smoothly. So I think we kind of... Yeah. We put that lock it in there to really force us to plan in advance, but also allow us that time to assess what we've done, make sure it works properly before that kind of crunch time really hits. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I'm sure that does make things a little bit smoother when you're not trying to change a lot of processes when you really have all hands on deck there during your peak. Yeah. What are some of the customer facing... Customer impacting issues that that you've seen that have been something that you really focus on when you're going through that that peak season? What what tends to break first? It's a great question. I think for us, the the team that I see that always breaks first is customer experience. I think the... There is an element of, like, the customer is always the first person to tell you that something is wrong. They probably spot it before anyone internally spots it. And because of that, that's a big focus for our preparation. Like, I sit down with the customer experience team at the beginning of March, and we could do what went well, what didn't go well, what do we need to fix for next peak, what do we need to stop doing for next peak because actually we did it this peak and it didn't work and the customers didn't like it and things like that. But I think, yeah, I think looking at key parts that have maybe gone wrong for us is kind of not picking up on problems quickly enough. So we're not noticing that there is clearly an issue with our return system because our return order queries for our customer experience team have ramped up so much, but no one's noticed. Everyone in, like, kind of the customer experience team, they're in the day to day. They're just dealing with tickets left, right, and center. Like, they have no time to think, oh, this is, like, the thirty fourth ticket I've dealt with in the last week that has mentioned this specific element. And I think something we put in place before last week was, like, this reporting ability where we could pull a daily report of all of the issues that had arisen in that last twenty four hours worth of tickets, compare it to previous twenty four hours, compare it to previous weeks. And if we notice any huge increases in numbers to flag and go, hold on a second. Our returns has increased... Return prices increased by 34%, 37%. Why is that? What is the, like, main issue that's caused that? And is there something in the back end that's kind of having that that problem, I guess. And then how do we assess that and and deal with that as a company? That's a really great call out as to have that close relationship with the customer's experience team and and letting them identify when when problems come up and just really being able to have the most impact there. So that's that's a... That's great advice for sure. I know that your business has really experienced a lot of growth in the last even couple of years. What are some of the things that have had to change over time as you've experienced that growth? So so much. As Jensen mentioned earlier, I've been with TBCo for just over four years now, so I think I'm coming up to my fifth or sixth peak here. And every every year, it's totally different. Every year, it changes. Like I said, we adapt. We stop doing things that don't work for us anymore. We start doing things that have to happen. I think some of the main changes that we've seen, like, over the last few years, so this year, for instance, we have moved to a third party logistics company, a new third party logistics company. I mentioned the no changes before that... After September rule earlier. So we went live with them within a six week period. It was very tight. It was a lot of work, but we knew that we couldn't go past mid September to be live with them and getting orders out because we needed that time to, as I said, like, nitpick any little problems, work through those with them. So, yeah, we moved to a new third party logistics company. We needed to for the growth. We couldn't continue in the setup that we had. There wasn't enough capacity to support the peaks that we were expecting. And We also, I guess, like, kind of moved, to how our inventory works. So in 2024, we made a decision as a company that the way our inventory was arriving wasn't working anymore for our peak. And I guess, like, inventory planner comes into that in terms of, like, that demand planning element of noticing that we were having a lot of out of stocks or the stock wasn't arriving in time for these huge peaks that we were experiencing, and then we were missing out on those sales. So I guess the element of, like, missing sales, but then we also have the element of our teams in the warehouse couldn't cope with booking deliveries in in November or even October for... While also dealing with the huge increase in orders that we were seeing during those times. And so in order to kind of, I guess, stop those out of stock elements and make sure that our demand planning was, like, on point, But also to help with the warehouses, like, general workload, we grew all of our stock kind of planning way further in advance. So stuff used to arrive in early November was now arriving in July because we needed to make sure that that stock was here in time, but also that we had time to check-in, to QC it properly, that we weren't rushing that because, obviously, that's such an important part of our customer journey. Like, we pride ourselves on beautiful products. We wanna make sure that the products are what we anticipated and expected from our factories. So, yes, that was one of the other, like, major changes we made. And that took time. Right? Like, we we already had deliveries coming in. We had to design collections earlier on, so we were, like, work... The design team now work a year in advance to make sure that we can meet those new timelines. But that took... I'd say, like, we made the decision in twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four. It it took until last year to kind of really see that bigger change come into play. So that's something that for Pete was important for us, but it wasn't our... We can get this done this year. Let's just do it. That was a... We now need to plan for this and make sure that we can we can meet that goal in a few years time and be... Behave that deadline. Wow. Yeah. So really, a lot of a lot of additional planning, a lot of being prepared, and not doing too many things at once. Like, all these different operational things, bringing in purchase orders at the same time that you're you're trying to get everything out to your customers. Just breaking that down, I can see how that would've been a benefit. But like you said, it takes time, and it takes a little bit of planning to get all those logistics. So it's great that you're able to make that happen and for the next season to have a better and a smoother season. Absolutely. And I I think to to just follow-up on that, the the floor that I think we used to have was that we felt like the operations team could do other jobs within peak because they weren't dealing with the day to day and therefore, like, oh, it's fine. Like, they're not dealing with the day to day. They can work on all these other important projects. So, like, things for next year and things like that. And, actually, one of the other changes we've made is realizing that the operations side of the business needs to have availability during peak because as we've discussed, like, not everything goes to plan. There is not all... There is always problems that arise. And if everyone is at max capacity because you have set deadlines and goals of the business for the teams that aren't maybe as impacted by peak, you then end up in a situation where people are are drowning in in workload and problems aren't being fixed as quickly as they can be. So I think, like like you said with the deliveries and making sure that the team had time to do that properly, I think that's also an element of, like, making sure that you have people in peak that aren't working at full capacity, that aren't on really strict deadlines, that can pivot and jump in to help on different things because inevitably there will be stuff that comes up that someone needs time to deal with that. And the only way you're gonna solve the problem... And usually in peak you have to solve them quite quickly because usually they're quite a big problem. The only way you're gonna solve it is by having someone that has capacity to deal with that as quickly as possible, and you you have to account for that. You can't you can't set everyone up to be maxed out for that period of time. Yeah. That's a great lesson learned for sure. And I know as your volume increases, you mentioned the three p l. I know part of that was probably you just had so much more volume of inventory coming in. You had to have a place to keep it. You wanted to hold it longer. So, obviously, you have more at one time. Just, what are some of the places that the operational team really feels that pressure, especially during peak? I think... I could probably get an example of, like, operational pressure. Like, I know I mentioned it before, like, the customer experience team really, like, they are, like, the pressure point for your peak. And I think customers have different expectations. From Black Friday through to Christmas, the expectations of customers are not the same as April time, like, summertime. They are all working to deadlines. They are all stressed. They are all trying to get their deliveries in time for certain dates. And I think the customer experience team are basically the people that are responsible for making sure that they have that great experience. They are usually the first touch point and the last touch point. A good example of something that we kind of... Like, in 2024, 2025, we'd... At peak, we'd experienced such growth as a company, that our customer emails were ramping up, and we inevitably, therefore, weren't meeting customer expectations because we hadn't accounted for that huge ramp up that we that we experienced. And I think one of the main things that we spotted was that because the customer experience team was so overloaded, they weren't getting to emails quick enough. And a lot of the emails were around, like, people editing their orders or wanting to make changes or they've made an error on their address and they were like, oh, can I actually? It's meant to be 62, but I put 60. And by the time the customer experience with getting to those orders or those emails, the order is already shipped. And you've then got this bigger operational problem because you've then got this order and it's placed at the wrong address or you've got the wrong item being shipped. You've then got return costs. Like, there were so many problems that are arising from that. We we... In... On top of the customer being really disappointed that they emailed and that that their point wasn't picked up. So last... Yes. So in 2025, September, we utilized Brightpearl's Shopify integration upgrade where you could now, like, allow Shopify order edits to push through to Brightpearl, which was a new thing for us. We've we've never used that before. I think Brightpearl launched in 2025, but don't quote me on that because I might be wrong. But we basically, like, put an order editing app onto our Shopify that would allow customers to edit their orders for thirty minutes, and we then work with Brightpearl team... The Brightpearl Support Team to build automations within our Brightpearl that would allow customers to... That would allow our orders to sit in Brightpearl for thirty minutes and not be pushed through to our warehouse. So utilizing that kind of Brightpearl Shopify Integration and the... Working with Brightpearl Support Team meant that, customer inquiries about editing orders, like, dropped by about 70% because we we solved the problem. We basically gave them the tools to solve the problem themselves, which reduced our customer experiences, workload, increased, our customers, experience, like, improve that as well. But it meant the... That element he mentioned of, like, where is, like, the biggest, like, where do you see those big big problem points or where do you see that downfall first hit? They meant that the customer experience team then wasn't that point anymore because they had gained capacity to deal with, like, more complex issues and things like that. That's great. That... I can see that would be a huge time saving for your team and and also just a better customer experience overall. So I'm glad that you were able to implement that. You mentioned that, you know, some of your manual processes feel manageable during the regular part of the year, but during peak, it just... It becomes a different story. So tell us a little bit about that. I think the... There are a bunch of things that you do on a day to day basis that you just see as part of your job and you're like, oh, this is like a a two minute job. Like, this is fine. I don't mind doing it. And then you reach, like, your capacity on workload and you're like, this two minute job is now not a two minute job and that you don't have time to do this. And I think this is where kind of that review, like, early review of peak comes in, but it's also where our systems come into play. So I think, like, I mentioned a minute ago about we worked with Brightpearl support team to build those automations for that order editing. We have over 90 automations running in our Brightpearl system, and that is everything from just changing a status to assigning stop to pushing the order to our warehouse system. There is a little bit of everything and and anything in there and every department has different rules running for them. But I think when it comes to things like... Even just things like we have, order collection. We have a shop in Edinburgh. Customers can ship their orders to here. We... Even just using Brightpearl to basically send an email to our customer experience team to be like, this order has now been on the order collect status for seven days. Normally, during the rest of the year, the team just go in and they can check down the statuses and see what see what, day the order was placed and be like, oh, this is a bit later and stuff. But when we got to peak, we realized we had no time to do that. No one was prioritizing going in and reviewing this. So building that process to be like, actually, you don't need to review it. We'll just get Brightpearl to tell you when something is over seven days, and you don't even need to go into the screen. You immediately get your alerts, your inbox, which you're already in every day, and then you can deal with that problem there and then. It's little things like that that, like I said, like, it just was opening a screen, but it just became a non priority and became unmanageable with everything else. How can you, like, improve those elements and allow your teams to kind of focus on the actual problems rather than just, like, dealing with the manual workload? Yeah. And that's that's super helpful. Wow. 90 automations. I can... I'm sure it adds up Over time, it saves so much time back in your day from all those different processes with the different teams and and, making the experience better overall. I used to use... I used Brightpearl before Brightpearl automations existed, and now I have no idea how I ever how I ever got through my day because I'm like, we're at 90. I used to have Zebra. They weren't even a thing when I started using Brightpearl. So, yeah, 90... I think we hit over a 100 at one point and then managed to, like, condense down. But, yeah, 90 is a big time saver. What are what are some of your favorite automations? You mentioned a couple that are there any others that you really like? One that we use on, like, a regular basis, I guess, is to manage our preorders. And so I was saying earlier that, like, our stock is obviously, like, really well planned and stuff, but we launched so many new categories over the last few years. It was eight... We launched eight new categories this year, which was, like, knit, knitwear, swim, like, all these different fun things. When you launch a new category, it's really difficult to kind of guess how much you're gonna sell of that product. Like, you obviously have your merchandising buying teams that are amazing and can predict as far as they can, but if inevitably you're gonna sell out something that you're like, didn't realize this was gonna sell so quickly, we now need more. So we work on preorders a lot, and we use Brightpearl automations to basically be like, if an order comes into the system and it has any of these SKUs within that order, put it on pre... Put the status on preorder, set the delivery date to whatever date we have told the customer we will ship the order by, and it's all automated. It works nicely. And that means that when that date hits of we're gonna ship these orders now, the team just mass select everything and push it all through to the warehouse all at once. They're not having to go through and find each order and things like that. So that's something we use, like, every, like, every every... I was gonna say every day. Every month, we have some sort of preorder running, and we use that the ability in Brightpearl to do that. And it it does really help us. That's that's fantastic. I like that. I know that peak never goes perfectly. So what are some things you've learned about responding when when things do go wrong? I think, like, obviously, I already mentioned, like, make sure someone on the team has capacity to pick up problems, and that's the kind of role within peak. I think the other thing that we've realized over the last few years is that it's better to get ahead of a problem than to allow your customers to just be telling you what the problem is. So I think, like, a good example is that we had a situation last year where a bunch of customers were sent the wrong scarf. We... They ordered red. We sent them red and white stripes. It was a barcoding issue within the warehouse. We had no way of ever anticipating that that was going to happen. We had a next day customer... Next day delivery customer email us. I've received the wrong scarf, and all of a sudden we were like, how would this happen? We looked into it and we were like, we have sent so many of these to customers, and they are not... They're all gonna be wrong. We knew they were all gonna be wrong. I think, like, in previous years, we would be able to be like, oh, maybe they're not all wrong. Like, let's just see the customers can let us know if they've got the wrong one. And it inevitably is a bad experience for customers. So... Right. Because you... I guess within Brightpearl, we just pop the SKU in that we knew we'd shipped incorrectly and pulled a list of all the customers that have been sent back in the last week, emailed them all en masse, and just said, hi. Like, look. This has come to our attention. We're so sorry. If you have received the wrong stuff, like, please get in touch and let us know. Like, we will almost rectify this for you, etcetera etcetera. But it meant we got ahead of the delivery. It meant that when they opened the box, they were anticipating it to be the wrong stuff. Not opening the box expecting the right one and then being disappointed, like, the disappointment had to kind of been lifted a little bit. And it meant that then we could, like, proactively deal with those customers on a much quicker response because we knew there was a big issue. We had a team member who was, like, your job is to solve this problem and deal with these customers as and when they come through. And I think that's something that we have learned. We have learned that, like, get ahead of the problem, tell your customers even if you even if you don't think it will be a problem. And you're like, I just think there might be a chance that this has happened. It's always better to be upfront with them and tell them because then if you're wrong, they just reply and go, oh, no. I got the right one. And you're like, oh, amazing. Great. Thank you so much. They're never gonna be annoyed that you emailed them and then got it correct anyway, but they will be annoyed if you got it wrong. No one has been in touch with them. Yeah. Absolutely. From the customer perspective, I can see how that would go a long way. And, you know, just as retailers, things do go wrong, and it sounds like you can't always prevent all problems, but as long as you stay on top of it and you're proactive about it and communicating with your customers, that's really the best way to to handle that. So... Yeah. Definitely. So tell me some of the lessons you've learned from previous peak seasons that have really changed the way that that you operate today at at TBCo. Yeah. I think I probably touched on most of them, but I think, like, the start pressing for peak as early as you possibly can. And, like, do your review until after peak when it's all fresh in everyone's heads and you've not forgotten something awful that happened that you've lost out of your brain because you're like, I just don't wanna think about that anymore. And, like, reducing your manual workload and, like, bringing inventory back... Inventory in as early as possible to, like, avoid that clash of operational decisions of direct focus on orders or inventory or what I do. I think the main ones that are really important to me that I think take a few years to kind of get used to and build is build processes that will flag problems to you. I mentioned earlier about our customer experience reporting where it flags that we... If we've had an increase in a certain, communication element, like refunds being higher. Like, we've got loads of emails for refunds, why have they gone up versus last week kind of thing. Flagging that, order hasn't been collected using Brightpearl automations and flagging that this has been sitting here for seven days and no one's done anything. Like, we should flag to the customer. But, also, I think my favorite one that I've kind of had to learn is know when it's too late to to to put something in place and kind of let it go. And I think that is really important as a company, and it's often difficult to do because you wanna put everything in place. My team comes to me with a list of, like, 200 things they wanna do before next peak, and I'm like, this is physically impossible. We have to choose, like, a priority. And we all work for them in a priority, and if we get all 200 done, great. No issues. But I think, inevitably, like, we have set that deadline of, like, September time. Like, we really don't really make any big changes. But also, it's that element of, like, we just don't have time to put this in place and do it well. And that is never to be gonna cause you more problems if you try and put it in place and it doesn't work than if you just let it go and go, do you know what? This isn't a priority for this peak. We have to just let this go and move on to, like... The next one. I mentioned the order editing with Brightpearl and Shopify last... Earlier on. We didn't put in place the ability for customers to cancel their orders using the app because it was a little bit more complicated than the address editing and editing your products. And we... It was in September we were doing it, and we were tired on times. We just made that call. Do you know what? We don't have time to do this. We're worried it's gonna break. We're worried it might not work. Let's just stop. And we will do it in February, March time, and it'll be ready for next peak, and that'll be great. And it it was fine. Like, we didn't have... Peak still went out. Like, there was no major problems, but we were probably gonna cause more problems by just trying to, like, get those last minute bits in. So I think, yeah, knowing when to say that's enough or it's too late, let's just leave it, is something that it's taken me personally a few years to learn and actually, like, has inevitably been really great in the in the long run. Well, that's that's great advice. And, it's been a really good conversation. Just to kinda close all this out here, just wanna ask you one more thing. What is one thing that if someone was watching this that you wanted them to take away from it, what what would that be? I think focus on things that directly impact your customers because they are they are the... They're the the heart of business. They are... For us, they are really important to us. Our customers are everything, and they will inevitably be the people that you let down if something goes wrong. So I think if you've not started planning the peak or you have a 200 to do list and you're like, I don't even know where to begin, I think for me, I would focus on which elements are directly impacting the customer and which elements directly impact kind of that end journey for the customer. Other stuff can wait and you need to, like, let... Like, prioritize based on that. And and... Yeah. I think... Yeah. And as I said, like, I think, like, look through that list and decide what things you can just park for next year. Like, this is this is not the time to make major changes. This is not the time to be like, should we change a system? This is the time to focus on those little things that are gonna have the biggest impact to customers. But, also, if you've got something little that's gonna have a big impact on your team and your team workload and and mindset, then that is also really important. But... Yeah. I think... Yeah. Focusing on those two elements. I think a last minute decision we made last year was to turn our phones off. We realized at this point that we just couldn't we couldn't meet our customers' expectations. There was no way. We hadn't improved it from the previous peak. We knew it was a tension point, and we just ran out of time. And I think that last minute decision of, you know what, let's just turn them off, probably saved us a lot of upset and stress for the team, but also for the customers and all of that. And I think, yeah, making little decisions like that right now are gonna be what saves you and makes your people less stressful. Yeah. Well, there's been so many practical takeaways from this conversation, Alice. I really appreciate you diving in with us and and sharing your experience. And, it sounds like it's really just about... Everything's not going to go perfectly when you have a lot of moving parts and you have a lot of growth, but just being proactive, having systems in place, and really focusing on the customer is is the key to success. Yeah. So I've... Yeah. I really appreciate you being here with us. And, Jensen, I'm gonna go ahead and turn it on over to you. Thank you so much, Alice and Day, and thank you to everyone and for, joining and watching. We will be sharing the recording after the webinar, so you will be able to revisit this conversation, or pass it along to your team if you would like. If you have any questions or would like to learn more about Brightpearl or InventoryPlanner, and how it can help, your team plan ahead and and stay in control, we will be sharing next steps alongside the recording. So thank you all for joining us, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.