The Unsung Hero Behind the Buy Button

Key Takeaways

• An overview of Tobar & Hawkins Bazaar

• How the business has adopted the new system

• What Naveo Commerce does for Tobar

• How Naveo Commerce stretches to handle one huge peak every year

• Their experience working with the Naveo team

You might be wondering why our video case studies mention Maginus and/or Digital Goodie? Digital Goodie acquired Maginus back in November 2019. The two companies have now merged and in September 2020 Naveo Commerce was born!

Transcript

Tobar started over 40 years ago and it’s been a wholesaler and retailer of toys, gifts, gadgets. On the wholesale side of the business under the Tobar brand the business has over 4,000 B2B customers in the UK and overseas. From as large as John Lewis and Sainsbury’s down to tiny, little corner shops and museums. Virtually every town or village in the UK is a customer. Even on the retail-side, Hawkins Bazaar has been the main brand over the years. The business has grown to now 40 plus shops, international and domestic business.

Naveo in Tobar and Hawkins Bazaar is the unsung hero really. We’ve got three strands in the business: We’ve got a wholesale, retail and direct. There’s a different way of looking at the information and Naveo is able to deliver that to us for all three sides of the business.

There was a real advantage of having one underlying system that manages all orders to service different customers. We are able very easily to have this complete overview of the business. The information that comes out can be more top-level – it can be highly detailed. So we know absolutely everything about everything that goes on.

OMS underpins the transfer of 5 million product units a year, over 40% of them happen in the last 3-4 weeks of the year. We have one huge peak season which is obviously Christmas. It’s when we need the most reliability on any systems that we got in place within the business and thankfully Naveo does deliver on that. It can stretch as the business stretches basically. I don’t think we’ve ever had any issues.

Over the busy time of year, near Christmas, we could have a hundred-plus agency workers in to help deal with the demand and moving towards paperless picking we’ve managed to cut more than half that.

Underlying all that is OMS and the help we’ve had from Naveo to do that. Within the company, one of the big growth areas of course has been online. On the wholesale side of the business we’ve introduced it not just in English because we do a lot of export as well around the world. It is quite an involved online operation that we have, but we couldn’t have it without the support of the IT system that sits behind it.

We’ve acquired a toy / gift wholesaler which is a fantastic addition for us. We’re installing Naveo into that business. Instantly, it’s giving us visibility on stock levels and the full product range.

The feedback from the staff has been fantastic they can’t believe this exists – so that all their daily jobs will all start to join together.

To be able to service two different customer bases and also cross sell their two different ranges. It makes their life easier which will make the business far more successful.

The plans for us are to continue to grow Tobar. We know with Naveo that they’re going to be a partner of ours going forward. They are moving in the same direction as we are and we’re all aligned on the same page.