[Voiceover]: Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous add to cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get you through your Friday.
[Voiceover]: Today's checkout features Lee Williams, founder and managing director at Eastaw Logistics. Eastore Logistics are a third party logistics, fulfillment and warehousing solution for small, medium and enterprise retailers. They run the fulfillment and warehousing for some of Australia's biggest e commerce brands including Kogan, Temple and Webster and MyDeal. With 20 million orders fulfilled every year and in the last 14 months alone tripling their warehouse capacity to 120,000 square meters. Fair to say Lee knows a thing or two around the fulfillment and warehousing game.
Nathan Bush: All right Lee, welcome to the checkout. We have five quick questions for you to learn a little bit more about you. We heard all about Eastall logistics and what you're doing fulfillment but we're going to get a little bit personal here. Number one, what is the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Leigh Williams: I had to give that one a bit of thought. It's custom dog socks. So these are socks with photos of my two cavoodles heads on on them. Caesar, Bailey and Samson. I've actually never worn them but I have the socks.
Nathan Bush: And did Bailey and Samson come out looking like Bailey and Sampson on the socks?
Leigh Williams: They looked awesome. They. Yeah, it's great. I can't remember where I bought them from so I can't, I can't plug it but they're great socks.
Nathan Bush: That's great. And this is a question without notice as a follow up and feel free to pass on it if you want. Has there ever been something in an east or logistics warehouse that's just caught your eye going I can't believe we house that?
Leigh Williams: Yes. A while ago we housed worms so we housed boxes which had soil inside them and worms and so people that needed worms for worm farms or these sorts of things bought worms online and they got delivered by Estore.
[Voiceover]: There you go.
Nathan Bush: That's not a pallet that you want to spill, is it?
Leigh Williams: No.
Nathan Bush: All right, question number two.
[Voiceover]: Tricky one given that you work with
Nathan Bush: a lot of retailers but who is your personal favorite retailer now?
Leigh Williams: I can't pay favorites with any of our clients and my favorite retailer at the moment is someone is a retailer I've spent a lot of money with recently. They're called Map. It's spelled M A A P. It's a cycling apparel brand. It's, it's a cross between a Melbourne Design. So it's a Melbourne retailer. They've gone all over the world and they're great designs. But what I love about this business is when I first found out about them, this retailer wanted to try out their cycling gear. I went over to their retail store in North Melbourne, tried on their product. It's a perfect example of a experience center. Tried the product once, bought a couple of things, and then I've gone online and bought everything since. So, perfect example of that.
Nathan Bush: So using the physical store as the customer acquisition, get people in the door. Once you know your sizing and you like and you've experienced, then it just becomes repeat purchase online. Brilliant.
Leigh Williams: Correct. Yep.
Nathan Bush: Number three, which retail fad do you wish was history?
Leigh Williams: Hand sanitizer.
Nathan Bush: It's.
Leigh Williams: Look, every client, not every client, that's going a bit far. Let's say 25% of our clients decided to get into hand sanitizer last year. And for our business, it caused a lot of challenges because it's dangerous. Good. And also, I don't think anyone wants to see hand sanitizer because they hate Covid, Right? And they just want to see Covid behind us. So, yeah, can't wait for that to be a thing of the past.
Nathan Bush: Are there racks of hand sanitizer left over that were, like, ordered in a
[Voiceover]: panic and, you know, delayed in shipment,
Nathan Bush: and now everyone's like, how do we get rid of this stuff?
Leigh Williams: Yes, there is a lot of that. And there's been a lot of kind generosity of retailers donating it to hospitals, schools, this sort of stuff to bring down inventory levels.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, yeah, it's a perfect retail product, isn't it? Because you can make it cheap, sell it high, high demand, out you go. But after the COVID panic, it's not as nice.
[Voiceover]: Number four, can you recommend a book
Nathan Bush: or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Leigh Williams: Look, we're on a retail e commerce podcast, so anyone that hasn't read the Everything Store, you know, Jeff Bezos and the age of Amazon, I recommend go read it. Look for me. I love it. It talks about the rise of Amazon, you know, goes through the forays into various product categories and how they decided to do that. It talks about all the setups, their fulfillment centers, you know, including the various generations of fulfillment centers and all the challenges they had there. And it also touches on, you know, the inventions of, you know, Amazon Prime, Kindle and AWS as well.
Nathan Bush: How do you look at Amazon? Do you look at them as a competitor, as an inspiration? Like, what's your relationship There.
Leigh Williams: Okay, yeah, definitely an inspiration in terms of what they've designed and rolled out. Right. Like they've just got highly optimized fulfillment networks and super high quality of fulfillment. I don't see them as a direct competitor because Amazon sellers, Amazon marketplace sellers, those that make a huge percentage of their revenue from Amazon, they're just not a store customers. Right. They fit into that Amazon ecosystem. But the risk they have is Amazon owns all the data and Amazon can change the algorithms and the marketing and all the rest of that and change what happens to their business at the flick of a switch. I guess the risk Estore has is that Amazon gets into products or has marketplace sellers for products which are similar to that of the retailers that are within our network and that causes a decline in volume. Now if there's a decline in volume, that means we've just got to get more retailers to work with. So then they're not a big risk for us. And a lot of our customers are what we call category champions. And those products are not yet available really on Amazon. Right there, you know, they might be a skincare product that you're obsessed with or whatever and you want that brand.
Nathan Bush: It's a nice way of putting it. A nice distinction that I hadn't thought of is that, you know, Amazon is the ecosystem where Estore is more the enabler for brands to have their own destiny.
Leigh Williams: Yeah, yeah.
Nathan Bush: All right, last one I've got for you. Finish this sentence. The future of retail is it's Eastore
Leigh Williams: in Australia, of course. Look, just joking. Although I believe that's true. Yep. Look, I think that the future of retail is going to be won by retailers that focus on convenience. So obviously we've seen how important fast delivery has been in the pandemic. We've seen E commerce penetration increase, we've seen supply chain strained and we've seen retail stores have to implement click and collect. Right. And some of them didn't have a good click and click model and some of them still don't have a good click and collect model. Right. So it's what mix of services retailers are going to offer to provide that convenience, Whether it's offering pickup points, whether it's having those lockers integrated, whether it's same day delivery, whether they've got retail stores that they're often clicking collect from. It's that mix and what's suitable for that particular retailer.
Nathan Bush: Brilliant. Leigh, thank you for sharing on the checkout.
Leigh Williams: No problems. Thanks, Nathan.
[Voiceover]: To hear more from Lee, jump back into episode 134. Where Lee shares how the Estore logistics model works across operations and technology for those E commerce businesses that they fulfill on behalf of. Lee also shares how eStore's autonomous mobile robots AMRs have pushed the efficiencies they can create to the next level and also allow them to offer a 4pm same day delivery delivery service. We also discussed why dangerous goods are so hard, why robotic arms are the future, and why Show Bags Yep, show bags have been the surprise covert e commerce hit. Thanks for listening and until next time,
Nathan Bush: keep adding to cart.
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