Classic Football Shirts triples warehouse productivity

Classic Football Shirts has more than tripled warehouse productivity through a five-year fulfilment partnership with Shipster, as it scaled to meet rising international demand.

The retailer generates more than £30 million in annual revenue, ships to customers in more than 130 countries and manages stock of more than one million individual shirts and memorabilia items. That range adds pressure in the warehouse, particularly when orders rise sharply around major tournaments, product launches and sudden bursts of online attention.

The latest operational change is the integration of a Logopak automated packing and labelling system into the warehouse. The retailer said the setup cuts packing times for eligible orders from minutes to seconds.

Over the wider five-year partnership, work with Manchester-based shipping software group Shipster has also included tailored routing and labelling processes, as well as support for the retailer's Mystery Box product line and international deliveries.

The system faced a major test during the World Cup, when the number of orders dispatched across June and July rose 101 per cent year on year. During that period, 64% of orders were packed automatically.

According to Brandon Evans, Outbound Operations Manager at Classic Football Shirts, that level of automation helped the retailer manage the surge while maintaining dispatch speeds.

"This World Cup put our fulfilment operation under sustained pressure and Shipster made a massive difference. Without the automation and flexibility we've built into the operation with Shipster, we simply wouldn't have been able to dispatch anywhere near the volume of orders we achieved and still maintain the speed and service our customers expect," said Brandon Evans, Outbound Operations Manager at Classic Football Shirts.

Handling spikes

Classic Football Shirts began as a university-house startup and has grown into an international eCommerce retailer with permanent stores in Manchester, London, Dublin, New York, Miami and Los Angeles. Its business combines online sales with a large physical inventory of vintage and modern football clothing and memorabilia, including rare and match-worn shirts.

For warehouse teams, that mix creates a more complex fulfilment environment than standard fashion retail because orders may contain one-off collectible items alongside more conventional stock. Its systems have had to adapt to both international shipping demands and rapid swings in order volumes.

Shipster, developed by Oddsphere, provides shipping integrations for eCommerce warehouses and works with more than 100 couriers worldwide. The Manchester company said Classic Football Shirts presented unusual demands because of its product range, global reach and recurring demand spikes linked to football events and online trends.

"Classic Football Shirts has some unique operational challenges. It manages more than one million individual products, ships to customers around the world and regularly experiences sudden peaks in demand driven by tournaments, product launches and viral moments. Over the last five years, we've worked closely with the team to build a highly automated and increasingly sophisticated fulfilment operation that gives CFS the speed and flexibility to adapt as demand changes," said Tony Cheetham, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Shipster.

The figures highlight the growing operational demands on niche retailers with large international online followings. For Classic Football Shirts, the ability to process more orders without a matching increase in manual packing time appears to have become central to supporting sales growth across a global customer base.