SUCCESS STORIES
The Bazaar Inc. is a family-owned business that has been leading the charge in purchasing namebrand closeouts for the secondary retail market for 60 years. They move hundreds of thousands of units of CPG goods to small and medium retailers and wholesale partners around the world. The Bazaar is a trusted name and provides a unique and valuable inventory asset-recovery reprocessing service that is unmatched in the marketplace. They work with a variety of product lines, like health and beauty, housewares, hardware, household, office and school supplies, automotive, toys, food, cleaning supplies, and more. They’ve seen a lot of change
In early 2019, The Bazaar was at a crossroads. Despite adding a second facility to help process a growing volume of merchandise a few years earlier, the company was at capacity and unable to cost-effectively scale and engage in new opportunities. Space itself wasn’t the issue, The Bazaar actually knew it could do more with less and had a goal of eliminating one 100K sq ft facility. They just weren’t quite sure how to make it happen.
Alpine jumped right in, they gathered and studied data to gain better insight into orders, items, product types, and quantities. They also completed a detailed process flow for each return processing area. According to Ryan O’Connor, SVP of Operations at Bazaar, “It wasn’t until all data and processes were validated, that Alpine and Conveyor Solutions developed several alternatives for us to review. Each alternative included equipment costs, estimated labor, and ROIs for us to evaluate. Their data and solution-based approach gave us a lot of confidence from the start.”
The Bazaar was able to consolidate all their distribution operations under one roof, eliminate the need for their 100K sq ft facility (and associated transportation costs), realize a 25% decrease in dock-to-stock time, and increase throughput through the new (larger, more flexible) processing lines. Overall labor costs were reduced by 30% upon completion. According to O’Connor, “Alpine’s data-centric approach provided Bazaar with a real-world solution to address our need to be flexible. The team was collaborative from the beginning, and did not try to sell us anything till they determined exactly what we needed. In the end, they developed a very simple solution to handle a very complex problem.”
