Linda Farrow, a manufacturer and wholesaler of designer sunglasses, sees its future in e-commerce, says Val Rucarean, senior sales administrator. The sunglass company creates its own line of sunglasses, and sells products from such popular designers as Dries Van Noten, 3.1 Phillip Lim and Matthew Williamson, who craft custom collections for Linda Farrow.
Both business buyers and consumers shop these luxury lines of eyewear, but about 90% of the company’s sales are to its 2,000 wholesale clients, Rucarean says. Linda Farrow’s business customers range in size from such big retail chains as Nordstrom Inc., and Neiman Marcus to small boutiques located at secluded island resorts. Nordstrom is No. 19 and Neiman Marcus is No. 41 in the Internet Retailer Top 500, which ranks companies on their online annual sales.
The London-based Linda Farrow’s business is also global—Asia is one of the company’s biggest markets, along with the United States—with sales to countries throughout the world. “Geographically, we have a worldwide reach. Literally, it’s almost every country across the globe,” Rucarean says.
But, with at least a 7-hour time difference separating Linda Farrow from its Asian and North American customers, placing orders could take a week of email exchanges between company sales reps and business clients, he says. Language barriers sometimes stretched the sales cycle even longer. Rucarean thought sales reps’ time could be better spent working with more designers to sell the Linda Farrow lines of products.
In September 2014, the company deployed Handshake Direct, a B2B e-commerce portal where Linda Farrow now enables clients to purchase itssunglasses online. Company sales reps had already been using Handshake’s mobile B2B m-commerce application for about a year to place orders online for customers at in-person meetings or at trade shows. “It was very user-friendly,” Rucarean says. “We had only high expectations for the online B2B platform.”
Since deploying the online portal, Linda Farrow sales reps have been able to schedule two to three additional appointments into their typical day. The number of buyers ordering online, meantime, has been growing about 20% month over month, and now approximately 35% of the privately held company’s B2B sales are processed online, Rucarean says.
“You have orders from the mobile apps for the sales reps, orders from the users through the e-commerce web site and order inputs into the system by home sales reps,” says Glen Coates, Handshake CEO. “All of those orders go into one single, back-end system.”
Rucarean declines to comment on the cost of Handshake Direct. But says the high return on investment has made the cost of the application “negligible.” The licensing fee for Handshake Direct varies by customer and is generally “thousands of dollars” a month, Coates says. Cost depends on the size of the client’s customer base, catalog and the amount of customization a brand requires.
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