A Look Inside Gilt Groupe’s Old School Warehouse
Gilt Groupe is growing up. The online flash sale site is well past its tipping point, which is why its operations practices are so interesting.
A piece on Capital New York gives an inside look into the operations of Gilt’s Brooklyn warehouse, some aspects of which will be moving to Louisville next year. The new warehouse is being custom-built for the company and will be more than 100,000 square feet bigger than their current digs. What is more fascinating, however, is how much of an old school operation Gilt currently runs.
And now: how stuff works… Gilt Groupe warehouse edition!
Gilt’s buyers place orders six to eight months in advance, much like buyers in brick-and-mortar stores do.
When the orders ship in, assistants pull one of every item—the skirt, or top that needs to be online within the week—and brings it upstairs to be steamed and hung on a model for the photo shoot. Meanwhile, two workers are preparing the rest of the order in time for the upcoming online flash sale.
They print out reams of stickers labeled with each item’s brand name, size, color and individual bar code. Once each dress or blouse or onesie is labeled, they are hung on the racks and wheeled in to the “rack room.” There, each rack is “zoned,” or labeled with a location, so workers know where to find the items once they are sold online.
Yes, this is all done by hand. But it doesn’t stop there:
As requests stream in for a size 7 Bettye Muller peep-toe ankle bootie or a size 4 white, one-shouldered Marchesa minidress trimmed with ostrich feathers, workers print out orders in sets of about 100 or so. A worker will find the location of each dress or blouse based on their barcode numbers and location. Gilt’s workers push a cart through the rack room and pick out items, one order at a time, by hand.
By the way, all transfers are done by freight elevator!
Once they have about 100 orders stacked up, with the hand-picked clothing wrapped in plastic and layered between sheets of paper listing the Gilt customer’s name, address and requests, they roll the cart to the shipping area. There are walls of boxes lining the room and workers are bustling about the floor, assembling cardboard boxes and moving around carts. There’s a line of several conveyor belts, where the packaging is done, and a worker will park her cart of orders in front of a woman standing by a computer screen. She picks up one of the sheets of paper, scans the order, and then digs through the cart to find each item printed on the page. If she scans the wrong item—if it’s the wrong size or brand name—the system will send her a virtual gong. She can’t print out the U.P.S. label until she scans the correct item.
Yet another worker receives the order and wraps it using Gilt’s signature elegant technique. Much of this will change in Kentucky, where robots will do a fair amount of the work. While it will certainly be more efficient, it will definitely be less charming.
[via Capital]
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