Text Cees Steijger

Leatherfactory.nl factsFounded Started in 2009 by Leder International Market share the only professional B2C online solution for specialist leatherwear shops in the NetherlandsForecast Further growth and market share in Europe through white labelling.

TIE ~ 1/2010 ~ P23

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Haute ContentSelling clothes on the Internet requires its own solution

webshop solution for the ready-to-wear trade. Leatherfactory.nl is a unique webshop that is fully devoted to the online sale of top-quality leather jackets for women, men and children. What makes web shops that sell clothing so special is that the correct size is all-important in ready-to-wear clothes. So a lot of information has to be provided in order to avert returns as much as possible.

Leder International offers its customers – the specialist clothing shops – with three options. The first option is Stock Access, the B2B option that provides access to the collection. This enables retailers to order products for the physical shop. The second option is the Whitelabel B2C option for retailers that have their own web shop – the option used by LeatherFactory.nl. This option provides all the functionality for extra sales without purchases. Thirdly, there is the Stock Online B2B option for retailers without a webshop that still want to benefit from the advantages of the Internet. Examples of this include online ordering in the physical shop. Several specialist leather shops have now chosen one or more options.

Flexibility “And, of course, every combination of options is possible,” adds Andre. “Because the bottom line is to make it easy for our retailers and their cus-tomers. We want to provide them with a very professional extra service without any fuss so that the maximum result in terms of sales and customer satisfaction can be achieved.” And Andre is already looking to the future. “After the Netherlands, we are going to roll this approach out in Germany and Austria and after that we’re going further. The advantage of the TIE Kinetix e-commerce approach is its flexibility and their international experience so we don’t

“With our web shop, we must be able to

provide the consumer with the tools for

experienc-ing the

product”

Leatherfactory is a customer of the wholesaler Leder International, which is based in Venlo. This town in Lim-

burg is a logistical hub close to Germany and with excellent connections to the Euro-pean hinterland. Leder International’s dis-tribution centre is located nearby in Reuver, from where this specialist in leather cloth-ing distributes its products to the European countries and to the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Leder International is a major international player and Leatherfactory is now the market leader in online leather clothing. The company has its own design-ers and outsources production to countries such as China, Pakistan and India. When we visited the company’s headquarters we could not fail to notice the enormous number of leather swatches, neatly grouped according to colour and type. “We’ve just launched our 2010/2011 winter collec-tion,” explained Andre Kuijpers, manager of Leder International. “For us this means the end of a busy period during which we developed and manufactured the new col-lections and showed them to our customers at various international trade fairs. We used the opportunity of the trade fairs – such as the recent one in Düsseldorf - to discuss our online vision and approach with our distributors and retail partners.

The talks revealed that existing cus-tomers have a great need of supporting online services from Leder International. The next logical step was to create a web platform for retailers that could be used for such things as White Labelling. Because of the enormous growth in use of the Inter-net, existing customers also needed Leder International to add an online sales channel as an extra service for its customers.

Leatherfactory opted for the advanced TIE Kinetix’ MamboFive Commerce Suite

Simplicity “A primary requirement is that the web shop is easy to use, so that you can proceed to the buy button in three steps, for instance, but it must also be easy to pay and there must be bullet-proof procedures for returning goods,” says Rob Westerhof of Leather-factory.nl. “For us there’s an extra challenge and that is the product experience. How do you add that? With our webshop, we must be able to provide the consum-er with tools for experienc-ing the product – the leather jacket of your choice – and so this means excellent photographic material with a zoom-in capability that goes down to stitch-level and a real catwalk where the consumer can see a model wearing the jacket. The re-tailers that we do business with are particularly im-pressed with this so-called haute content, and all the more so because they can implement this webshop in their own house style as a white label.”

There’s something special about web shops that offer clothing for sale. After all, when it comes to ready-to-wear clothing, aspects such as size

and the customer’s experience of the goods are all-important.

need to concern ourselves about using it locally or regionally. We can continue to focus on our core business: offering fash-ionable leather clothes in the EMEA.” Fine. So what trends can we expect to see next winter? “I predict that tight lambs-leather women’s trousers will be a hit,” says Rob Westerhof. “Although, surprisingly, warm cow-leather jackets will do very well in the Middle East. We’ve just received a large order from Jordan.” Clearly Leder International also has a large amount of flexibility in its collection.