Specialist 3PL logistics provider Europa Warehouse continues to help ecommerce brands like Beerwulf to thrive across the ecommerce market, where beer is projected to grow the fastest over the next few years.
Europa Warehouse – part of Europa Worldwide Group – provides a range of value-added capabilities at its award-winning, integrated sites in Dartford, Birmingham, and Corby, with a combined 1,072,000 sq. ft of dedicated warehouse and logistics space.
The online beer retailer, which is owned by Heineken and specialises in home bar taps, kegs, and beer cases, has partnered with Europa Warehouse since 2020. This came just as demand for its products soared during lockdown and Beerwulf smashed its sales forecasts by 150 per cent.
During this time, people were looking for more creative ways to make their pad the pub as national restrictions prevented socialising in the more traditional ways. Beerwulf was quick to respond to this trend, putting plans in place with Europa to accelerate the distribution of goods so drinkers remained connected with their favourite brewers and beers.
The logistics firm supported Beerwulf with its inventory challenges, so it had clear visibility of current stock levels. This meant it could better plan to meet growing consumer demand.
At this point, Europa also stepped up to deliver greater innovations from an order fulfilment perspective, ensuring its pick, pack and delivery processes were as agile, dependable, and affordable as possible for Beerwulf.
This involved a complete process transition at the warehouse, where bottled stock was phased out and replaced by prepacked beer compositions to boost volume and increase capacity. Some categories that were in the portfolio of Beerwulf’s previous UK 3PL logistics provider also had to be integrated across into existing stock levels.
With bulky, heavy products and low margins, the cost of doing business has always been one of the biggest challenges for Beerwulf. Europa offered the right balance of sector experience and a focused, hands-on approach, responding flexibly to the needs of an expanding enterprise.
Once the initial Covid demand had stabilised, Europa and Beerwulf began to plan for maximum capacity. During the course of 2021, the focus was on building up the right space and tailoring the processes to ensure this objective could be met.
This culminated in the Black Friday sales peak in November 2021, when the average daily capacity of goods moving through the facility rocketed by over 3,000 percent, from 2,500 kegs to a total keg volume in excess of 40,000 on one particular day.
Despite the immense demand for Beerwulf’s products having exceeded all previous fulfilment records, Europa was still able to deliver optimal quality and scalable services in line with these significant fluctuations.
Since then, Europa and Beerwulf have sought to achieve a more sustainable maximum capacity throughout the warehouse. With the built-in flexibility of the team and a stable base we are now much better equipped to deal with the volatile volume development.
Most recently, as Beerwulf has moved from start-up to scale-up as it strives to achieve sustained exponential growth, Europa has set about implementing an entirely new operational interface at its warehouse facility. This embraces the very latest technology to keep production flowing and optimise pick rates to achieve maximum outputs.
All three of Europa Warehouse’s sites in Corby, Birmingham and Dartford are Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) approved with system integration and bespoke IT solutions. Each provides a range of services, including e-commerce fulfilment, production services, inventory management, packing, labelling, special deliveries, final assembly, quality control and critical parts management.
Europa Worldwide Group is an ambitious independent logistics operator?with three divisions, Europa Road, Europa Air & Sea and Europa Warehouse. The company has been featured in The Sunday Times Top Track 250?for three years. Europa has invested £5 million in its innovative market-leading product, Europa Flow, providing a frictionless flow of goods between the EU and the UK post Brexit. The group employs over 1,400 people with 29 international sites in the UK, the Republic of Ireland, Europe, Hong Kong, China and the UAE. The global operator recently reported a record turnover of £302m for the last 12 months, as of August 2022, and remains on track with its ambitious investment programme.
Beerwulf is based in Amsterdam and recently celebrated its fifth birthday. The ecommerce platform offers consumers a one-stop-shop to bring the bar home, with a range of unique home bar taps, kegs, and accessories, as well as curated beer cases. Beerwulf has a presence across ten European markets.
@europaworldwide
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