Wear You Want is a rapidly growing Thai e-fashion startup with offices not far from Doubletree holding a team of about twenty. Julien Chalte and Martin Toft Sorensen are the two experienced co-founders of Wear You Want who are currently navigating their venture through the tricky early growth stages when managing growth is of paramount importance. To effectively manage growth, e-commerce startups like themselves need to pay particular attention to logistics. In his presentation, Julien clearly describes the challenges they have faced and the solutions they have implemented. Initially, they operated based on the drop shipping model in which Wear You Want simply acts as order taker and the supplier handles delivery and inventory management. This proves to be an easier, faster and cheaper model for Wear You Want without the cash flow fears that can arise when carrying a large inventory. However, there are many disadvantages associated with the drop shipping method. Relying on the punctuality and competence of merchants, branding for yourself, inability to accept cash-on-delivery (COD) and the possibility of discovering a problem in the supply chain too late represent real challenges experienced by Were You Want and quite common amongst e-commerce entities. Now they utilize the B2B2C model whereby a courier is contracted by Wear You Want to pick-up the order from the merchant and then delivers to their customer. This does translate into less work for the merchant and, importantly, allows for COD which is vital to establish trust, particularly for those who order for the first time using their platform. However, there are trade-offs. It is more work for Wear You Want, slower and more expensive. Recently, they entered into a much welcomed partnership with Line who offer Wear You Want products on their social chat platform via flash sales. For them, the beauty of using Line allows for a consignment-based model that effectively captures the best of the previous two models without the associated risks.
What’s next on their agenda is to better educate their partner merchants in stock accuracy and speed of delivery, convenience stores delivery, credit card on delivery and regional expansion. The latter is largely beholden to logistic capabilities.
What Julien cites as success factors for e-commerce ventures include stock accuracy to build a happy clientele, COD to earn their trust, delivery speed to be competitive and keeping it simple for merchants likely less motivated than you to please the customers.