F. Curtis Barry & Company’s Multichannel Operations & Fulfillment Blog

Too many times recently I’ve entered a client’s facility and quickly identify the warehouse manager is either no longer in control or really never was in control of the operation. The position of warehouse manager should be thought of with the same relevance as sales or marketing, but too frequently companies are satisfied to […]

Peter Rice! Yes, one of the real catalog and e-commerce entrepreneurs in the multichannel industry, Peter was the founder and CEO of Plow & Hearth and sold it to 1-800-Flowers companies. Peter is joined in new ventures by his son Pete and Tom Freshour, formerly vice presidents for Marketing and Customer Contact Center, respectively, of […]

In this difficult and increasingly competitive retail environment, catalog merchants are more challenged than ever to increase sales and profit. From what I am seeing, the good news is that merchandising executives are increasingly giving emphasis to both sales and profitability metrics when measuring catalog performance—a healthy direction that will be sure to increase profits […]

We all know that e-commerce has had big percentage growth for the past three years. In fact, e-commerce grew 20% overall last year, even though that’s largely a transfer of sales from catalog. Many of our clients now have more than 50% of their total direct sales coming through e-commerce.
E-commerce has just received another kudo. […]

This past week, I had a call from a multichannel company about why their order management system selection process had failed. In their case, they signed the vendor agreements prematurely only to find out that the bid was incomplete. There weren’t any estimates for modifications, interfaces, conversion and training. As a result they had been […]

From many traditional catalogs with e-commerce sites, all I’m hearing is doom and gloom. And the national news media aren’t any help with the consumer. I’m not trying to say it isn’t a tough business climate out there—it is.
I believe two of our traditional clients did well because they are leaders in their merchandise niche, […]

A couple of weeks ago we hosted 23 of Stone Edge Technologies’ customers at our two-day seminar, How to Improve Fulfillment and Operations. For those of you who don’t know Stone Edge, they sell an order management system for small to moderate sized direct businesses. They have over 1600 customers, second only to Dydacomp. I […]

Under the title “CEO Pinching Penney In a Slowing Economy” the January 31st Wall Street Journal ran a wide-ranging interview with J.C. Penney Chairman and Chief Executive Myron “Mike” Ullman III about topics including preparing for a recession, slowing store growth, and tougher decisions on inventory. The interview ran the same day Ullman announced plans […]

Many retailers fell well short of holiday sales plans that were fairly conservative to begin with. What does that mean? Challenges from 2007 are extending into this year during the final phase of the product life cycle: markdown and liquidation of unsold merchandise.
We’ve found that most multichannel merchants were sticking fairly closely to traditional liquidation […]

Milestone Partners and co-investor Continental Investors announced on January 15 that they had completed the acquisition of D.A. Kopp and Associates and certain affiliated entities, together doing business as “Dydacomp.” The following day, investment bank Berkery Noyes announced that it represented D.A. Kopp & Associates, Inc., Card Management Services, LLC, and Card Financial Services, LLC […]