O'Neill (Europe) |
O'Neill Europe find an effective and time efficient way to present their product ranges and retail propositions to their clients. The following text is from a speech by Frank van der Klaauw the CEO of O'Neill Europe. O’Neill invented the neoprene wetsuit in 1952 and is now Europe’s leading manufacturer of functional and lifestyle surf / snowboard sports and casual wear. Annually our designers create over 2,500 styles that are sold in 35 countries, 400 'shop in shops' and 20 O’Neill stores. This abundance of styles and the geographical spread through various O’Neill sales channels are the main reasons why O’Neill selected Visual Retailing. We were looking for an effective and time efficient way to present our product ranges and retail propositions to our clients. The first time Bartel and Maurits presented the possibilities that VR offers, everyone at O’Neill was very impressed and, after months of using the VR tools we still are... VR was exactly what we needed. In the past, O’Neill sales reps and store managers needed a university degree in Mathematics and Communication to effectively present the collection. Now, we use pictures to communicate because, as we all know, a picture paints a thousand words. This is all thanks to VR because it makes it easy for the O’Neill teams to paint those pictures. Our store merchandising documents are now visual planograms instead of lists of numbers and written instructions, our range catalogues are visual instead of being spreadsheet print outs and, internally, we can see our ranges and retail propositions visually. Literally we can see it all at a glance. VR made all of these pictures by assembling:
And from these components we can now build presentations every month, by theme or all at once. Try doing that manually with a collection of a 1,000+ styles per season… When we presented the power of VR to our partners last year, even our most stubborn distributors bought the program the same day. Now visual merchandisers and sales reps across Europe are discovering and enjoying the power and simplicity of VR. We are now producing 40 planograms per week instead of 2! That’s only a 2,000% productivity gain. These new presentation tools mean that we can now sell our collection as coordinated merchandise stories instead of just taking orders for individual items to satisfy demand. In addition it saves time too. The sales calls are now achieving much more in a much shorter period of time. This is something that O’Neill desperately needed because we are moving to more collections and deliveries per year. Before I forget our designers also use VR in the development stage. By using VR to visually analyse the range, they can fill the gaps and get balance in the collection at an early stage. Finally we save a lot of time AND money by producing our sales tools in house. This was something that we had outsourced but it took too long to produce and it was far too expensive and time consuming. Frank van der Klaauw - 15th November 2006 - whilst opening Visual Retailing BV's new offices in Haarlem, The Netherlands. |
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