THE BIG INTERVIEW
We asked Mariusz Stochaj to tell us about Continental Clothing’s new webshop and soon-to-be-introduced mobile phone app.
Can you order online? Yes, we have a webshop. About 70% of all our orders come through the webshop – and ordering will soon be available on mobile devices.
What are the advantages? On the webshop you can see exactly what we have in stock. If youʼre sitting in front of your client, and they want something in olive green, for example, you can see straight away that there are three different lines, all in olive green and that they are all in stock. You donʼt need to keep going backwards and forwards. You type in your order and it goes directly into our system and into the warehouse. We dispatch the majority of orders the same day, on a next day delivery.
What if an item is out of stock?
As well as showing you what is in stock, it also tells you when an item is in production and when it will be available again. The webshop is updated every hour.
Who developed your webshop? We initially hired a company and spent a lot of time and money adapting it to our needs. And it never worked. It cost us more than £100,000. So we ditched it and wrote our own program from scratch. We actually wrote our own webshop – just like we are now writing our own mobile application, because that works for us. We do that a lot.
Has that resulted in a better customer experience? We are a peculiar company, being business to business in a fairly hermetical market. So you really have to understand your market. Thatʼs why we never get an art director to design our catalogue – because they wouldnʼt know who they were designing for. In the time it would have taken to give him all the instructions, I did it myself. It was the same with the website and the same with a lot of other things. The majority of ecommerce platforms are consumer-based. They will ask you to select your colour, select your size and then you have
EASY TO USE: Above, a page from the webshop showing all the colours and sizes for a particular style on one page. LEFT: Click on a button for more information about the garment, live stock levels, numbers for garments in production and when they are arriving.
to reload and select the next colour. Whereas here, customers can choose a particular style and order all the colours and all the sizes they need on just one page. There is also a stock report which tells you everything thatʼs in the warehouse. Our webshop has made it easy to order a lot of things in one go. Itʼs so quick and easy. When I watch our customers use it, itʼs great because you can see their delight that it is so intuitive. The next step is a mobile version which is in testing now.
Why an app? A lot of people have smartphones and a lot of small businesses work on the move. Without the app, youʼd see the customerʼs order, but would have to forward it to someone back at the office to process. The app avoids all of that.
Do you Tweet? Yes, we are on Twitter and Facebook. We donʼt Tweet very often – 132 Tweets and 145 followers so far. Weʼre getting there. Again, we donʼt advertise or promote this in any active way, so those people who like us or follow us have just found us. Itʼs the keeping in touch that is changing in terms of new media.
ʻThereʼs a strong business reason for creating the opportunity for changeʼ ■ From previous page.
away sales of a wholesale baby doll T shirt.
“It was essentially a fitted T shirt for women, in interlock, with cap sleeves,” explains Mariusz. “Baby doll nightdresses are quite different! It was fitted around the waistline and quite short for what you would expect now. It was the first fitted T shirt for women and people wanted it.” It still features in the collection today, in a slightly different form. “For many years after that, when other brands brought out fitted T shirts for women, they were still often called a ʻContinentalʼ T shirt. Itʼs great to be the first one and itʼs great to be followed by others but copies are always imitations and they are never better. I have never seen a copy that was an improvement on what we did,” he adds. I suggest that the company must be enormously proud of how far itʼs come. “Sure, we like what we do and how
| 36 | August 2012
things are working out for us,” says Mariusz. "We are not ideological campaigners.
We are businessmen, and if we can make sustainability profitable, it's a classic win-win. There's a strong business reason for creating the opportunity for change, but it also makes us feel good about what we do." The short term aim is to concentrate on product development, which is not only driven by fashion but often starts with the yarns.
“There will be new products for made to order – probably before you go to print, and there will be new stock lines coming in probably in early autumn,” says Mariusz. The company also plans to introduce products seasonally, rather than at New Year and mid year. “When we look at our stock range, we are looking at definite shapes in the
correct fabric. The initial filtering is here, within the office. We bounce ideas off people. Ultimately, itʼs intuitive at the end of the day. We do argue amongst ourselves, all the time. But ultimately, we know when everything fits together.” So what have the high points been? “The awards are always a nice thing,” says Mariusz. “This might be a bad answer, and possibly not what youʼre looking for, but the high point is the continuing development of the company – that weʼre growing year on year, despite the external conditions and despite the internal difficulties. We are growing all the time, which is great. We are not only growing by increasing sales to our existing customers, we are acquiring new customers all the time.”
■ For more information visit
www.continentalclothing.com
www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk
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