Container Arrival & Distribution.
The latest cotainer load of Oriental Furniture arrived at the warehouse this time last week. Due to the large volume of bespoke and standard Chinese Furniture orders in the January and February period this container had to be a 40 footer. To try and reduce the lead time for made to measure units we usually order 20ft containers and order once we have enough to fill the 28cbm that is required. On this basis we usually order six 20ft containers of Chinese Furniture each year which usually gives a lead time to our customers of between 14 and 20 weeks for bespoke units. However on this occasion we had no choice but to order a 40ft container due to the number of bespoke requests that we had to fulfill. As a result, the Zenzu warehouse was absolutely stuffed with products on Friday afternoon with no room whatsoever for the area we usually reserve for customer viewings. This week our excellent delivery partner Motorlink Distribution, from whom we rent the Zenzu warehouse, have been fulfilling customer drop offs, and the amount of Oriental Furniture in the warehouse has been falling.
We estimate that 50% of the 40ft container is going straight out to customers who have ordered earlier in the year. The remaining 28cbm of Chinese Furniture is made up of standard stock items and we are at the point where nearly the whole Zenzu Oriental Furniture range is in stock.
Stock keeping is always a fine balance between storage space, cash flow and ordering dead stock. When new Zenzu products are introduced to the Oriental Furniture range we usually order only a single piece. We then guage interest in the ensuing months and order more items on that basis. Of course, when there are three years of data available on a product such as a large wardrobe it should be relatively easy to ensure that sufficient stock is available. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work like that: a large order from a hotel, although very welcome, can completely wipe out stock of a key item in an instance, while an article in a newspaper or household magazine publication can create a sudden surge of orders. To run a small company efficiently it is not feasible to have huge amounts of warehousing space and vast amounts of buffer stock. By keeping warehousing costs down, having slimline stock levels and focussing on our bespoke services we are able to meet the finite demand of the Chinese Furniture base that is available through are online marketing endeavours.
